


Rey’s Feast

by ninemoons42



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: BAMF Women, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Food, Food Issues, Multi, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Star Wars Extended Universe - Freeform, Women Being Awesome, jedistormpilot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-29 00:19:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8468581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Rey learns to fit in among the various groups and beings in the Resistance by learning about what they like to eat and drink -- and she learns that food is a means of communication, of reaching out, of understanding emotions, and of making friends.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Maybe don’t read this story on an empty stomach. I mean it. :)

one: cinn-lemon tea

There is blood on her knuckles, there is blood on her hands, and she can still feel the snowflakes’ long-since-melted imprints on her skin. Water that froze, that turned into a sharp-edged solid, and fell from a haunted sky that was slowly dying as its sun flickered towards unnatural death. The terrible cold of the water -- the _snow_ \-- that heaped around her and fell in flurries onto Finn’s body. That swirled up around her with every kick and every stab and every attempt to strike Kylo Ren down, until the earth groaned and yawned and drove them apart.

Water. How was that water? Water to Rey is a flowing resource, sparse and precious, and there is never, never enough of it. Water is the metallic aftertaste it leaves on her tongue as she thirstily gulps the contents of her canteen down. Water -- the absence of it -- is arid choking dryness that leaves cracks in her skin and thorns around her throat, that leaves her parched and gasping.

Water. The medical droid -- it clicks and chitters and she recognizes it as an odd morph of a Too-Onebee series, at once both more mechanical and more fluid in its actions as it tends to the blood on Finn’s back, to the wound in his shoulder -- talks gently to her. Indicates a ’fresher unit next door, and her grimy hands. 

Grimy hands are not -- not _right_ for this place, this place where she believes Finn can be healed.

Rey’s knees shake as she pushes herself to her feet.

The corridors are empty.

The ’fresher unit is nothing she expects: there are cubicles with the familiar mechanisms of sonic scrubbers, a handful of them. But what really catches her attention is the additional room, accessible through a set of swinging doors that look like they’ve been salvaged from the S-foils of old X-wings -- she can see the distinct cutout corners on the panels, see the ghostly imprints of stripped-out circuitry and wiring.

Beyond those swinging doors is an open space, separated into tiled enclosures. Mottled plasteel panels serving as makeshift dividers. Within each enclosure is an arrangement of pipes.

Pipes. Rey stares at a segment. Lengths of these pipes would be valuable depending on the material they were made from -- but these pipes are damp, they’re stained, and when she takes a deep breath she sneezes on the lingering moisture in the air. 

And that’s when she realizes what the pipes do.

Water, she thinks, water for washing! What a preposterous idea! What an unheard-of luxury! Was water nothing to the rest of the Resistance, that they could easily give it over to this particular function? Water that flowed into -- she looked at her feet, at the bottoms of the enclosures -- water that swirled away, down into the drains, and then where did it go? Was it recycled? What else was it used for? How did they recirculate it? 

Water for washing -- 

She turns around. There are stone basins in the corner, placed beneath a long expanse of mirror. Both the sinks and the mirror seem stained around the edges. Basins with -- she gropes for the word -- taps, she remembers the Too-Onebee droid had mentioned taps -- so she reaches out for one, shyly. It turns more easily as she twists it to the left -- and water pours out, startlingly scalding-hot at first and then cooling very rapidly. 

She holds her bruises and her knuckles under the icy water and sighs in relief.

There’s a pot of white powdery stuff between the taps. It smells like -- like damp sand, Rey thinks, irrationally, damp in those fleeting moments of dawn and dusk when the Jakku sands inhale and exhale and cast their molecules and trace elements up into the air. The moments between scorching day and freezing night. The white stuff makes her think of being clean, of the sweat and the salt scrubbed away, and she pinches up a small amount and rubs it all over her hands, and her skin grows slick and frothed with fine bubbles and sweet-smelling suds -- and it all rinses easily away under the continuing flow of water.

Flow.

Hurriedly she turns the tap to the right, and the gushing water dwindles away to drops falling quietly into the basin.

Oh no. She’s wasted so much water. She must ask about her chores. Surely they’ll let her stay, if she works off the debt, the waste of a precious resource.

She dries her hands off on her trousers. Her skin gleams up at her. The flakes of blood are gone, the ozone-stink of lightsabers clashing is gone.

Finn is still unconscious when she trots back to his side. 

She takes his hand carefully in hers and whispers. “They have water in the ’fresher units here. They use water to clean their hands and their faces. The water is cold, but it feels good even when you’re shivering. Wake up, Finn, we have to see what else they’re doing with the water here. There’s so much water -- I can’t understand it -- it takes my breath away -- ”

“If you want to see water,” and the new voice all but makes her jump out of her seat, all but makes her let Finn go, “I can tell you about the river.”

Rey blinks. The woman makes her think of -- a different kind of water. Salt water, the kind that stings, that dries to stiff trails on her cheeks. “General.”

A weary smile. “You can call me Leia, if you like. And -- you remind me of someone, talking and thinking about water as you do.”

“I’m from Jakku.”

“A desert planet, yes, I know.” Leia stumps over to Rey’s side of the bed. She hobbles to the other chair. Rey can feel the pain that drags behind her every step. “I’ve been to one or two of those. No rivers on those planets, or they’re far too deep underground to tap. But here, there’s a river running through the southeast sector of the base -- it’s too fast and too broad to ford on foot. I asked some of the crews to build a bridge over it; it was one of the first things we did when we settled here. Now I think we might have to dismantle the bridge. Where we’re going, we’ll need those struts and girders.”

“You’re leaving,” Rey says, and she feels dull and leaden and the words make her slump down.

“We’re leaving, yes, we’ve been making plans to leave D’Qar for a while now. It’s never been the most secure of locations. And now, _compromised_ is the very least of our worries.” 

There’s a pause, and Rey fights off her dread and unease. She has no idea where in the galaxy she is, and she has no way of knowing how to get back to Jakku. It’ll be difficult, when they send her off. And her with a debt of water that she still has to pay. Could she hitch a ride on the _Millennium Falcon_? No doubt Leia will take that beautiful old bucket of bolts with her, when she and the Resistance leave -- 

“Rey,” Leia says.

“Ma’am,” Rey says.

“We are leaving _this planet_. I only mean that in the physical sense. I am not leaving you behind, and I am most certainly not leaving your friend behind. You’re one of us now, and so is he. When you come back from your mission -- and please realize that I intend for you to come back to us, to wherever we’ll be settling -- you won’t be returning to this planet, do you understand? That’s all I mean by leaving.” 

Leia looks kind and she also looks determined -- the kind of determined that stops Rey’s train of thought dead, that makes her realize: _Oh._

“Me,” she whispers. “Me. I’m part of -- this. The Resistance.”

“If you’ll have us,” and the weary lines in Leia’s face turn into a brief flash of a smile. “We would certainly love to have you.”

A debt, a debt. Rey feels a need to confess. “I -- I should stay, because I’m using your resources. Finn and I, we’re taking up space, we’re using your water and your bacta and -- ”

Leia sighs, then, and the lines in her face seem to deepen. “There’s certainly enough to go around, now. We -- we have lost so, so many -- ”

“ _I’m sorry I’m so sorry_ ,” Rey blurts out. She was there when Han died -- but now that she’s opened herself up to the Force, she can see how it ebbs and eddies around Leia, around the dried tracks of tears on her cheeks, and she cannot _imagine_ how Leia is still standing. She had to have felt that death. She hadn’t needed to be there to _know_. 

The leaden silence that falls is interrupted by the dignified shuffling gait of a gold-plated droid. “Princess -- ah, no, apologies, _General_ \-- your tea things have arrived.”

“Thank you, Threepio.” Leia stands, and Rey makes herself stand up, as well. “Will you come with me?”

“Finn,” Rey says. 

“Don’t worry about him. The medical droids will see that he’s not disturbed. And you can return to his side. I would just like to invite you to tea.”

When Rey thinks of tea she thinks of cloudy near-black liquid that could knock a happabore onto its ass, but she can’t refuse, not when the offer is this kind and this gentle and this compelling, and reluctantly she lets Finn go. “I’ll be back,” she whispers, and then she’s looking at Leia and nodding.

Down a corridor and then around three corners. Rey counts her steps, and pays attention to the vines and the stains and the patterns on the walls, so she can make her way back to the medical quarters. A door opens before her, no different from the other doors that she’s seen all over the base, and she steps in.

“Thank you, Threepio. You may leave us,” Leia says.

“Should you have need of my assistance, I shall be assisting in the command center,” Threepio replies, and the door closes behind him.

“Come and sit,” Leia says, next, and Rey follows her to a low-slung table, to a handful of mismatched chairs. Atop the table: a vase full of tiny five-petaled white flowers and their circular blue-green leaves. A low squat vessel with a spout. Three cups, no two of which look alike. 

The spouted vessel fills the air with a fragrant, earthy, almost spicy aroma, and Rey takes a deep breath of it, and another, and another. “Is that tea?”

“One part of it,” Leia says. “Look in the cups, tell me if Threepio put the cinn-lemons in.”

“Cinn-lemons?” But Rey takes the nearest cup. Blue, and chipped around the handle, and heavy. It is glazed a darker blue inside, and at the bottom there is something heart-shaped. Reddish-golden rind and pulp, white pith, radial lines from the center. “There’s something in the bottom of this cup.”

“If it’s shaped like a heart, it’s a cinn-lemon. A slice of it. It goes with the tea. Do you want to try it?”

When the tea hits the cinn-lemon the spicy aroma intensifies, brightens, so that suddenly Rey thinks of Poe Dameron. He’d smelled like the cinn-lemon and like a soft wood she’d only seen a handful of times in her years on Jakku. It gave off a scent that made her think of cool winds touching her skin.

Belatedly, she blinks, and looks back to Leia -- and she takes the spouted vessel from the table. It’s heavy, and very hot, but she’s weathered boiling sandstorms -- this is nothing compared to that -- and she pours, as carefully as she can, into Leia’s cup. No chips on this one: a dark brownish-yellow that looks lopsided at first glance.

Again that tea-scent, that wood-scent, and the cinn-lemon’s startling freshness, and she can’t get enough of those smells, and she moves to fill the third cup.

But Leia raises a hand. “Dameron can pour for himself if he joins us,” she says. “For now, we’ve got the tea to ourselves.”

“This is not what I was thinking about when you said Ôtea’,” Rey says.

“Taste it first.”

She takes a cautious sip, and another. The scents flow across her tongue, and in their wake: soothing spices, and a warmth that seems to sink into her bones, nothing at all intrusive, nothing that will scorch her -- just a warmth that settles comfortably and purrs, and she has to fight the urge to down the contents of her cup. 

Not that the scalded tongue would have stopped her, if she’d gone through with it. 

“Good?” Leia asks, eventually.

Rey is so moved by her cup and its depths and the shape of her cinn-lemon slice that she can only nod.

“First of many,” is the encouraging reply. “I’ll be glad to have someone to try different blends with. Tea is common, you know, in the New Republic. Different places, different cultures, different kinds of tea.”

“I -- I’d like that,” Rey says. “To try those different kinds. To have tea with you.”

Again that weary smile, but this time it lingers.

And Rey feels all thoughts of being indentured to people like Leia slide away from her, flowing away as easily as water. 

So she picks the spouted vessel up and offers to pour some more -- she smiles when Leia accepts -- and then she refills her own cup, and sips, contented.

two: wroshyr-grub in spicy sauce

One more kiss to Finn, who sleeps on -- but she imagines he must stir, a little, when she whispers that they will surely meet again. When she says, “I promise I’ll come back. I’ll come back to you.”

One more moment to hold hands with Poe Dameron, who is waiting to slip into the medical quarters to take her place, waiting at Finn’s side.

Poe Dameron has prominent veins in his hands. He has calluses that are very nearly familiar to the ones on her own hands. His contort his fingers into the shapes of the controls of his heavily customized T-70. He has silver in his hair and he has laugh-lines creasing his face. He is kind and he is always ready to laugh, never at her even when he has to explain things like how Blue and Red Squadrons rotated onto duty, or why the starfighter pilots -- with the slight exception of Temmin Wexley -- seem to look much like each other, in terms of the dimensions of their bodies. Shortish, for the most part -- some are as broad-shouldered as Poe himself is, and some are much more slender, and some have extra limbs and extra appendages that they fit into the bright-orange flight suits anyway.

As soon as she turns the corner, as soon as he’s out of her sight, she misses him almost as sorely as she does Finn.

Leia, waiting for her on the tarmac, bestows an approving smile, and Rey can’t help but want to stand up straighter. The clothes are not precisely new -- some of them smell of time spent in the store-rooms -- but they fit her well, and they keep her warm in the base’s breezes. 

“I’m glad we found a jacket that fits you,” she hears Leia say as she runs her eyes over the _Millennium Falcon_. “I always felt cold in space, no matter what kind of ship I was in.”

“I’m grateful for -- for the provisions,” Rey begins, and then she falters some more when Leia stoops to the crate sitting next to her feet and pulls out a lumpy, many-times-wrapped-and-secured package. “Um?”

Leia wordlessly points to what must be the top, because it’s the only part of the package flat enough to hold a label.

_Not to be opened until you jump to hyperspace._

“I -- I have nothing to give you in return, if this is how you mark departures,” Rey begins, eventually.

But she watches as Leia shakes her head. “What you can give me, you can _bring back_ to me.” A heavy sigh. “Convince my brother to come back to us. You can -- I suppose you could try kicking him.”

“Kicking him,” Rey repeats, dismayed and amused at the same time.

“Tell him I said you should. He’s my brother, he ought to understand.”

And then Chewbacca calls out, and she hears the _Falcon_ ’s engines thump-roar into life.

“May the Force be with you, Rey,” Leia says.

Lift-off -- and though the ground drops away all too quickly, she doesn’t lose sight of the General. She keeps looking at the place where Leia must still be standing. 

_Thud_ of a paw landing gently on her shoulder, and she looks to the co-pilot’s seat. 

Chewbacca rumbles at her, brief, but she imagines that there must be a lot of emotions crossing his face, from what she understands of the words:

_I have followed her as much as I have followed Solo. And I would follow her and her alone now that he is gone._

“I think I’d feel better,” Rey says, carefully, “if you stayed with her, next time. Not that I don’t want you around. Not that she needs that much protection. Not that this old beauty doesn’t need you any more. But -- she needs you, too, and you need her. Yeah?”

She gets a nod and a quiet _urf-urf-urf_ in response, and she smiles, and pats his arm, and goes to check the nav computer. They have to clear this system and part of the next one before jumping away. Security, Rey thinks, as she watches the calculations scrolling up on the screen. There was no point in leading the First Order anywhere near D’Qar, even though the Resistance was already in the process of packing that base up.

One base, one Resistance, and no longer a New Republic to officially or unofficially back them. She thinks of Starkiller Base and grinds her teeth, and she has to make sure that her hands don’t suddenly clench upon the controls. 

Chewie groans quietly. _You don’t have to think about the war, not now._

And, reluctantly, she takes a deep breath. “You’re right. We’ll be back in the middle of it soon enough.”

They slip into another system, and they sit on their long-range scanners for the better part of an hour, watching anxiously in all directions, before she hits the right set of switches in the right order, and the stars stretch out into bright infinities before collapsing into mottled speeding brightness.

Hyperspace.

Chewbacca grunts, after a moment, and gets to his feet -- but Rey isn’t left alone in the cockpit for very long. The thrum of rolling wheels on the floor, and the inquiring _beep_ , alerts her to the presence of a many-times-scratched-and-repaired dome head, to blue-and-red lights blinking in her direction. 

Even she’s heard tales of this particular astromech droid -- precursor to and hero of BB-8 -- and she smiles at R2-D2’s optical sensor as it wags at her. “Come to keep me company?”

She gets a smug chirp in response, and she drums her fingertips gently on the droid’s side, before she reaches under the chair and pulls out Leia’s lumpy package.

Each item in the bundle is carefully wrapped many times around with insulating material, and she’s very careful as she undoes the layers. She wants to keep them intact. There’s no telling whether she’ll need them again. 

And every item that emerges from the bundle makes her smile, until she can feel the grateful tears leaking from the corners of her eyes.

The cup is not the same cup that she had been served cinn-lemon tea in. It’s a different shade of blue, deeper and dotted with tiny flecks and specks of silver-white, and when she fits her hands around its rounded belly there’s space to spare between her fingertips. 

The bowl matches the cup in its glaze, in its decoration, and it is shallow and sturdy and heavy and wide. Enough for a large meal. There is a five-sided shape traced into the bottom. 

She runs her fingertips over the rough rims of the cup and of the bowl and tries to imagine Leia using them, and can’t help but smile some more.

_Good, you have a bowl, let’s eat._

And Rey looks up from the consoles, surprised. “You weren’t gone long.”

Chewie blinks at her. _It only takes a moment to reheat the food that I brought._

Food. Her stomach takes that moment to growl. She doesn’t remember when she woke up from her restless doze at Finn’s side, and from there she’d had to go on to prepping the _Falcon_ , and then to say her few goodbyes. 

There’s food, and that’s important, but -- the ship. Someone has to mind it as it hurtles through hyperspace. 

She lets her eyes roam over the consoles as she gets to her feet, and then the Force comes to her, whispering and eddying, and slowly she begins to become aware of a _presence_ in this cockpit. Steady hands and rough gruff kind-hearted humor, and wrinkled creased scarred hands on the controls. The smell of battered laserbolt-singed leather. 

Rey glances at Artoo, and says, “The two of you can fly the _Falcon_ for a bit.” 

Another chirp, affirmative.

She carries her cup and bowl to the dejarik table, to an amused huff from Chewbacca -- and then he’s taking the bowl and putting a heaping ladleful of _something_ on it -- 

She peers at her would-be meal closely. A sparse brown sauce flecked with bits of wavy-bordered leaf and tiny black grains. It smells like roasted nuts and a handful of spices, only one or two of which she can identify. But the focus is on about a dozen elongated segmented bodies, each about as thick as her pointer finger and half again as long, tiny dark spots on each end, and _those_ smell almost familiar, almost like the protein she used to cook back on Jakku. 

Chewie nudges her gently, encouragingly, and she grins at him, unafraid, and wades into the grubs: and the first bite makes her giggle and swallow hurriedly, and take another bite. Savory flavors explode onto her tongue, the crisp skins a sharp contrast to the mealy delicious pulp within. She runs her finger through the sauce, licks the sauce off. Bright spicy heat that clings to her teeth. “Is there any more?” she asks.

 _Urf-urf-urf_ again and a brief rumbling. _Solo never liked wroshyr-grub._

She should have been sad to hear Han’s name, here on his ship where he’ll never stand again -- but she thinks laughing at him might be another way of honoring his memory, and she says, “Now he’ll never know what he’s missing out on.”

The Wookiee pats her on the shoulder and passes her another helping, before he starts in on his own meal. For a moment, the only sounds in the cabin are the two of them chewing and swallowing.

She uses the last grub to wipe the remaining bits of sauce from her bowl, and pops the grub into her mouth, appreciating the faint musk of fragrant wood and the meaty aftertaste. “Thank you, Chewie.”

A soft groan. _You are easier to feed than any of the others._

“When it comes to food, yeah, Poe says I’m an easy customer.” She thinks of plates full of root-vegetable stew and double-fried tubers; she thinks of delicate cakes that fall easily apart into piles of crumbs; she thinks of creamy soft cheese, white riddled with blue-green veins. He’d taken the time to tell her about the different foodstuffs that they could easily obtain at the D’Qar base, and about the ones that they couldn’t. 

She wants to eat with him again, and preferably with Finn at that table too.

Maybe when she comes back, she’ll get that chance.

Chewie rumbles. _That is one less thing to worry about._

“Is there any more of the grubs?”

 _That was all I could trade for._ Chewie sounds genuinely mournful, now. _They are not very easy to find, this far from Kashyyyk._

“You missed eating them, didn’t you.”

That gets her a nod and another pat on the shoulder. _I was happy to share them with you._

“And I was happy to eat them,” Rey says, and she wonders about where she could find something to share with him.

three: toto-pods

It takes her several days to learn the name of the planet where Luke Skywalker has marooned himself in exile, because he doesn’t talk to her for several days after she offers him his lightsaber.

Though she does learn that what she thought was his lightsaber had originally been constructed by his father. 

And even on Jakku people know that name, that armor, that bloodsoaked reputation: _Darth Vader_.

The visions in Maz Kanata’s cantina are slowly, slowly starting to make sense.

“Let’s take a look around,” she says to Artoo, one cloudless morning.

Artoo chirps and chitters at her, rapid-fire but not agitated, and the gist of it is that she has no way of traveling from place to place aside from the cumbersome hulk of the _Falcon_.

“Which seems to have blown another set of actuators out, honestly, I can’t figure out the cross-wiring on the blasted thing,” Rey complains. “Are you certain that neither Han nor Chewie were on mind-altering substances when they decided they’d _upgrade_ its engines?”

Short beep: _No._

“Why am I not surprised,” she says, and in the end she laces up her boots and straps her staff into place, and she walks to the base of one of the bent and twisted and wind-wracked trees several feet away from where Chewie’s busy hunting for another wrench. 

And the Wookiee looks up from the scattered contents of a toolbox to roar an amused warning in her direction, which she acknowledges with a wave that is only mostly cheerful.

She’s too busy studying the tree itself.

A sprawl of roots disappearing into hard-packed soil and low-slung grass, and patches of darker earth in the joints and junctions of the roots, from where a few brave little pale-purple flowers sprout, their five petals blowing in the brisk breezes. Where her boots crush the blades of grass she thinks she can almost smell the lush green of them, although there’s too much salt in the air for her to be sure. 

(The salt here is just as rough on her skin as the sands of Jakku had been, and she’s glad to recycle her old arm-wraps and sleeves, turning them into makeshift scarves that she pulls up to cover her cheeks when she sleeps.)

From the roots, she turns her gaze toward the trunk: and it’s a twisted and gnarled thing, like so many coarse cables and wires and pipes bundled roughly together, and then bent into a tortured angle by the relentless wind that even now whistles at the back of Rey’s neck, that yanks strands of hair out of their orderly loops and whips them at her temples, at the corners of her eyes.

And from the trunk emerge the branches, as oddly contorted as the rest of the tree. All kinds of knots and angles. Leaves sprout from the branches at irregular intervals, each palm-broad and clinging stubbornly, darker green veins among the yellow, their edges fluttering in constant movement.

She wishes, briefly, for a few coils of her make-shift rope-wrapped climbing cables: she’d had loops upon loops of the stuff packed away in the corners of her AT-AT. Strong enough to support her weight but light enough to easily carry, neatly organized and clipped to her belt. A useful and necessary tool in the Graveyard of Giants, and one she wants, here on this watery planet. 

Still: nothing ventured, nothing gained, she thinks, and she’s been in the crash-wrecked crawlspaces of junked Star Destroyers, and those places are full of sharp edges and lurking shocks and sandbound predators. Nothing hazardous about this tree, compared to those wrecks. 

So she takes a deep breath and picks up a double handful of loose soil, brushing most of it away, careful to leave a thin layer of grit on her palms and on her fingertips. 

Artoo chirps at her, once, a warning to be careful.

Rey nods, and puts a soil-gritty hand onto the tree trunk, and she seizes one of the lower-hanging branches and uses it to pull herself partway off the ground. 

One step up, and then another. There are plenty of crevices in the bark of the tree, but not all of them are adequate as hand- or foot-holds, and then there’s the problem of putting just the right amount of weight on the branches, too. 

Up she goes, shimmying carefully from one branch to another as she leaves the trunk entirely and starts going _out_ instead of _up_ : past the angle at which the tree has been permanently deformed by the wind, past the branches whose leaves have been ripped away over and over again.

She catches a brief flash of scent on the breeze. A fruit, maybe, she thinks. She’d spent time on the D’Qar base learning about fruits. They were fleshy things, most of the time, overflowing with sweet stickiness and sometimes an abundance of seeds. They came in an entire range of colors. She’d shared the pulp and, when they were edible, the rinds, with anyone else who’d happened upon her as she sat at a metal-topped table in the deeps of the Resistance’s night-time shifts.

She pauses in her climb, now, and squints into the branches above her. Catches sight of a cluster of deep purple things, delicately spotted in black. She only has one of them for her goal, but the entire cluster pulls away so easily, and now that it’s in her hands she can let herself be overwhelmed by an intense blend of sweetness and freshness. Such a bright scent that she wants to be immersed in it, that she wants to fall into it.

Speaking of falling.

She watches her feet all the way down as she climbs. Clutching the fruit means she only has her feet and one hand to make her way with. “Rope, rope,” she mutters, dissatisfied. 

Artoo beeps up at her, distressed -- and then there’s a sound that’s so much like a step, and a flash of movement that looks like someone’s hand -- but not a flesh-and-bone hand. An armature of metal, and familiarly positioned joints. 

She grasps that cold cold hand, salt and soil mingling, and when her feet are finally back on the grass she looks into the face of Luke Skywalker. 

She still can’t read his expressions. All she knows is that there are too many lines radiating from the corners of his eyes, from the solemn downturn of his mouth.

She offers him some of the fruit. “Are these edible?”

He shakes his head, slowly. The wind whips his loose, unbound hair every which way. The cloak he’d been wearing on their arrival is nowhere in sight. “They are, but I don’t care for them.”

“Why?”

“Too many seeds.”

“I don’t see how that’s a problem.” She makes a beeline for one of the crates that Chewie had unloaded from the _Falcon_. Plucks a fruit from the cluster and turns it over and over in her hands. Tries to count the black spots. The salt-laden breeze sticks in her throat and she wonders if the fruit’s supposed to be eaten _with_ salt -- and then she shrugs and peels it, the skin coming off in long strips that trail fibers and -- well, there are the seeds that Skywalker was talking about. There seem to be hundreds of them, embedded into the flesh, little black spheres coated in a clear jelly-like substance.

“Swallow too many of those seeds, they’ll poison you,” Skywalker warns.

Rey nods thanks, and bites in.

The flesh of the fruit squishes between her teeth, and juices escape from the corners of her mouth, and she chews and swallows cautiously. As for the seeds, she carefully sucks each little bit dry, and then she leans over to the side and spits the lot out.

Such a cloying sweetness that lays heavy on her tongue. Delicious and too much at the same time. The cluster had four fruits in it and she decides to see if she can eat one of the others for her evening meal. This is not a fruit for gorging on, not like those delicate lovely golden berries that Kaydel Ko Connix had introduced her to.

She sees Skywalker look up, then, and she licks the juices from her hands as she retrieves the cluster of fruit and gets to her feet. 

“They’re called toto-pods,” he says.

“Are you sure you don’t want any?” Rey asks as she steps past another one of Chewie’s toolboxes. Honestly, how many of those does he have? More importantly: why does he need all those tools? She eyes the _Falcon_ , doubtful and a little amused.

“Thank you, but no thank you.” And as Skywalker stumps past, he adds, “Perhaps we could speak of my sister, and the Resistance, at the evening meal.”

She blinks. Stares at his retreating back. “Are you planning to join us?”

“Rather I hoped that you and Chewie and Artoo would join me. I realize I’ve been a poor host, and this is no way to welcome you to Ahch-To.”

“Ahch-To,” Rey echoes. “So that’s what this place is called. The -- the map had very little information on it.”

“It was made that way,” is Skywalker’s reply.

She watches him disappear down a winding path, and then turns when Chewie groans inquisitively at her. “I’ve only recently started to get these things called dinner invitations,” she says, tapping a fingertip against her lips, “and that has to be the strangest one of them so far.”

He roars agreement.

four: rootleaf stew

When they reach the top of another set of staircases Rey flaps her hand in the general direction of Chewbacca and Artoo -- the latter being carried in a makeshift harness on the former’s back. “You go on ahead. I need to catch my breath.”

She gets a quietly amused howl in response.

Once he’s out of sight, she sits on a nearby rock outcropping and looks around, carefully.

The sun has finished setting, but there are still plumes of fading golden light in the sky, and by those dying lights she can take in the grass on the cliffs. The rough-hewn stone steps that she’s been climbing. The sky is a deeper blue compared to the ones on D’Qar, on Jakku. She wishes she could remember the sky on Takodana, that sky that arched over great swathes of green that she’d never seen before, before it lit up in five great deaths. The stars here are different, and she can really appreciate that they’re in another part of the galaxy completely, that the stars she’s waiting for are not the ones that Poe might be looking at whether he was on patrol or a mission or back on base, and not the ones that Finn might see if he were awake.

Night-scents on the salt-heavy wind. Smoke drifts upward, still visible, from the peak that she’s supposed to be making her way toward. It brings her the scents of singed leaves and resins popping into flame. 

She had drunk a lot of water during the afternoon, when Chewie’d conscripted her into looking into a set of sparking wires in one of the cargo hidey-holes on the _Falcon_. It had been thirsty work, and she’d poured the water down her throat too quickly, but she thinks that not even all that water could wash the taste of that afternoon’s toto-pod away. Sweet lingering fibers stuck stubborn in her teeth.

The breezes blow more and more strongly the longer she stays, and she wishes, briefly, for a cup of caf made the way Poe drinks it, thick with too much sweetener and the barest dash of cream, before she hauls herself back to her feet, before she starts climbing again.

It had been easy, the first time she’d attempted those steps, steep and unevenly winding though they had been. Now they’re just a pain in her knees. She misses sitting on her sled to navigate the long twisting slopes of Jakku dunes. She misses her landspeeder. It’d be in someone else’s hands by now, and she wishes, futilely, for her doll and for her helmet and for the lamp that she’d hung just above her hammock.

She sighs, and turns to navigate another spiraling set of stairs that hug a cliff-edge, and then, suddenly, she’s on relatively steady ground. A downward slope, speeding her steps, that ends at a low door into a ramshackle stone shelter. 

She raises her fist to knock.

The door opens of its own accord. 

“Hello, Rey,” Skywalker says from the far end of the single chamber. He’s a cloak and a silhouette against a blazing fire, against a shower of sparks. “Please, sit. Dinner is almost ready.”

And she looks toward Chewbacca, who could almost be comical where he’s hunched over a low table. Knees up. He’s trying to make himself smaller, and even so there doesn’t seem to be much room left around the table. 

She squeezes in anyway, to a burbled greeting from Artoo, and she can’t fit her legs under the table, and she wonders how Skywalker manages. 

She whispers to Chewie: “What’s for dinner?” 

The Wookiee actually wrinkles his nose and shrugs, and rumbles quietly. _I hope he’s learned to cook._

And Skywalker asks, “I’m still alive, aren’t I?”

Rey giggles softly when Chewie groans and shakes his head. Not disbelief, not exactly, but there’s no trust in those eyes either, and for a moment she lets her mind wander, lets herself _try_ to think about the man in the pale cloak as someone no older than herself. A boy from another desert planet, yanked away into the largeness and the greatness of the galaxy, and his role in the stories of his time.

She blinks when Skywalker says, “Well, perhaps you could try this and tell me.”

Three bowls around the table, one of them noticeably larger. Rey pushes that in Chewie’s direction, then takes one of the others, and peers into the fragrant steam. Cooked greens, she marvels, greens that were _plants_ and not chopped-up chunks of protein. She can see the roughly-chopped leaves and stems and make out the patterns of vein and branch and growth. 

She picks up a utensil and stirs it around in her bowl, and the mound of softly cooked greens on top collapses with the movement, and she can smell -- oh, all right, it’s not the same meat she’s encountered before. There’s something much lighter about this smell, scorched against pan and oil but not as greasy as the food back on Jakku. Ground meat, falling easily into smaller chunks and bits as she continues to stir.

A deep breath, a warm spicy scent, and she pops a portion into her mouth. The -- broth? Sauce? -- washes hearty flavors across her tongue. Just the barest hint of spicy heat, just enough of a delicious edge, and the greens crunch very quietly between her teeth. The meat is richly flavorful. It makes her stop and take another deep breath, appreciating the textures and tastes.

The idea of a _weight_ in the air around her, a weight that is actually an emotion, and she glances sidelong at Chewie before she looks up and meets Luke Skywalker’s eyes.

He feels like too much time passing, like too much time leaving him behind. He feels like the unimaginable twin weights of loneliness and guilt, like self-doubt and mourning that is both strangely old and unspeakably new. 

At the same time she can sense something else in him, something very much like the bright hot spangle of _pride_ : and she compares that feeling to finding her helmet, a lucky stumble, a fortunately stubbed toe, and a yellow starbird on a grimy, dust-etched shell of cracked white. 

“You’re -- you still want to live,” she blurts out, after hurriedly swallowing another mouthful of food. “There’s so much you’re carrying around and yet you -- you still want to live. You still have some kind of hope.”

She’s expecting him to say yes, or say no -- instead Skywalker’s response is mild and gently surprised. “Is that what it’s called?”

“You’re so sad I’m surprised I can’t taste it,” Rey says. “The General -- Leia -- she’s sad, too, but she’s sad like she’s strong, like she’s just going to keep going forward. I don’t think anyone could stop her from moving forward even if there had been Star Destroyers strapped to her ankles. I think she’d just keep going on no matter how huge the weight was. And she’d just keep on being sad.” She pushes her bowl in Chewie’s direction, then. “But you. You’re the same as she is and yet you’re so different. Hope, and, and there’s fear too. You’re afraid, the kind of afraid that makes you think you want to just _fall_ from the high places of this planet -- so many cliffs -- ”

She falls silent. She’s so tired suddenly. She lists against Chewie, who roars quietly at her, scrubbing a huge paw up and down her back. He’s rough and soothing and so kind.

Artoo shivers and shakes, and lets out a worried little sigh.

“He didn’t do anything to me,” Rey finds herself saying, after a moment. “It’s -- it’s just how it is.” She swallows and huddles against her friend’s fur. “I. I need to learn how to fight Kylo Ren. I need to learn how to stop him. But if you’re not coming back with us -- ”

“You want to stop him?” Skywalker says. He is still, incredibly, eating. Placid movements, repetitive. He dips his utensil into his bowl, and puts it in his mouth. He puts the utensil back in the bowl. Over and over, until she can hear it scraping the last of the food out. “You don’t want revenge?”

“Revenge will -- revenge will kill me,” Rey breathes out, after a moment. “It was like that, in Kylo Ren’s mind. I was in his mind. I opened myself to the Force and it led me through his mind and he was _dead_ inside. He thought he wanted revenge, but for _what?_ He killed his friends, he killed those children, if anyone was going to want revenge it would have been them -- no one ever hurt him, not his mother and not his father and not -- not his teacher, his _first_ teacher -- ”

Something clatters next to her.

Rey closes her eyes and cringes away.

A hand on her shoulder. It’s cool and segmented and the joints whir a little when they move. 

Skywalker looks as aged now as he had been when she’d first seen him. Maybe more. She can see pain, loss, a terrible grimace, etched into the lines of his face. “I needed to hear you say that, I think,” he says, “and for that I must thank you.”

She catches her breath. Opens her mouth to speak.

He gets there first. “No, you haven’t insulted me. Your words are painful, but in a good way, a truthful kind of way. Some truths are like that, you see -- first you see them as injuries and then you see that they were necessary. That they were things that you needed to learn. Learn or perhaps remember, I can’t always tell which.

“You’re right, Rey, I was only Ben Solo’s first teacher. I did my best by him. I never hurt him -- not a one of us did. Why would Han and Leia ever want to hurt their son? He was their pride and joy. He was the one thing they’d gained from the wars. They gained him and then -- ”

“They didn’t lose him,” she whispers, picking up on his train of thought. The Force’s whispers in her ear. “They wanted him to stay. They wanted him to be your -- your? Your pupil.”

“My apprentice. Him and the others. We all wanted them to succeed,” Skywalker says. “Ben, and the rest. Ben, whom you know as Kylo Ren. And indeed that is now who he is. But not by my hand. Not by Han’s or Leia’s. I see the enemy clearly. Perhaps I always have. It was not my inaction or the way I trusted.

“It was Snoke.”

“I don’t want revenge against him, not even in Han’s name or in Leia’s,” she says, and the words hitch around sobs. Overloaded, she thinks, there is too much of the Force around her right now and it’s got its claws wrapped around her throat, and she can’t breathe, can’t -- 

She thinks she hears Chewie gnash his teeth, a threat -- 

She thinks she hears Artoo let out a long high-pitched complaint -- 

And then suddenly the pressure is gone.

She can open her eyes, she can sit up again. She’d been curled into Chewie’s side. She’d been clutching at strands of his fur.

And next to her, only a man with stooped shoulders, a man who cooks, a man who hasn’t fallen. 

“I’ve been here far too long, I think,” he says, and his hand pats her shoulder, very gently. “Will you give me a little time to pack? And then perhaps you could give an old man a lift. I must see my sister. Before anything else, I have to talk to her.”

“You can borrow my cup,” she says, and when he blinks at her in confusion she explains. “A cup. She drinks tea. She’ll offer you some -- and you can drink from my cup.”

“Ah. Thank you, that’s very kind of you,” Skywalker says. And: “I will see you both at the _Falcon_. I shouldn’t take too long. Rey?”

She gets shakily to her feet. She’s not ashamed to cling to Chewie’s paw. He’s a towering mass of kind strength at her back. His fur smells like salt.

“Keep the lightsaber, for now. You’ll need something to train with.”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes -- Master.”

He stops dead as he stoops to put the fire out -- and then, unimaginably, he turns around and smiles. A small sliver of a smile, faded and worn around the edges, and it makes her think of a rock that used to stand out in a sea of waves made of sand -- a rock that was all sharp edges until one day she passed it by and it no longer drew the blood from her palm. Gone the edges and in its place was an almost-smooth surface. “You can call me that when we get back.”

Chewie roars, after a moment, and Rey blinks at him. “Braid?” She touches her hair, wonderingly. “I have to wear a braid?”

“The apprentice’s braid,” Skywalker says. “Worn by a being who had been accepted by a Jedi Master for training. They were worn in the days of the Old Republic, and in the days of the New.” He looks only a little wistful as he says those words. “I never wore one, myself, however, though some of my apprentices chose to. So you are under no obligation to do so.”

Rey is still touching her hair as she follows Chewie and Artoo back to the _Falcon_.

Maybe Leia can give her some advice on the braid.

five: a cup of caf

They’re running through the second series of pre-flight checks when the comm pings.

Chewie groans. _You’re not answering that._

“It has to be me,” Rey says. “No one knows Master Luke is on this ship. And we’re keeping it that way until we’re landing at the new base.”

 _Which we know nothing about. We have no idea where we’re going. Flying blind._ She thinks there might be swearing, somewhere on the edges of those words.

She reaches up to pat his shoulder. She has to do it balancing on the tips of her toes. “I know it’s dangerous. But there’s nothing else for it right now.”

She gets an affirmative sigh for that -- and then he pulls her into a rough furry hug, and she grips back as warmly as she can, digging gently into his skin.

She passes Master Luke in the cabin, and picks up Artoo who tails her right into the cockpit. She clenches her fists, once, twice, then activates the comm. “ _Falcon_.”

Flickers, a burst of static, and then: a warm voice and a warm smile and -- she squints -- a face wreathed in steam. “Caf,” she groans quietly as she drops into the co-pilot’s chair. “I could use three pots of that right now, but only if you’re the one making it.”

“And Testor says I make lousy caf,” Poe Dameron laughs. She thinks he might be clutching at the stained and chipped white mug in his hands. It is far too large for him. “She’s not _wrong_ , honestly, Rey, not even Snap will drink the stuff I make -- ”

“They don’t know what they’re missing out on,” she tells him, mock-seriously. “And I want some. Right now.”

“I promise to deliver a pot to you as soon as you get here. Which reminds me, that’s one-half of the reason why I’m calling you. We’ve got a lock on the new base -- you’re going to have to swing out to Dosuun.”

“I don’t even know where that is.”

“You know those systems where the Outer Rim kind of blurs into Wild Space?”

She shakes her head.

“Well, that’s where you’re currently heading. Talk to your co-pilot, he’ll know most of the way there, I think -- and if you get stumped let us know, and we’ll send a beacon for R2-D2 to unscramble so you can get to the exact coordinates.”

Rey glances at the squat droid humming next to her, and pats its dome. “Looks like you’ve got a task to do on this run,” she says.

Artoo shrills confidently at her.

“I think I got most of that,” Poe says. “You’re coming back soon, I hope.”

“If the _Falcon_ lets us fly her in the next two hours, we’re getting off this planet.”

“Great, because here’s the other half of why I called.”

There’s a squelch, and she glances at Artoo who just snorts at her, and then -- 

“Hello, Rey!”

_Finn._

He’s alive, he’s awake, he’s smiling at her, and she feels like making the _Falcon_ do another backflip. 

“I’m still stuck in this bed, which is not good, because I want to get up and I want to help them pack up the base -- ”

“You have better things to do with your time than haul crates around,” Poe interjects.

Finn makes faces at him. “Better things like what? Lie down when everyone else is rushing?”

“Do I have to remind you that if you reopen the wounds on your back _you’ll die_?”

Rey reaches out to the flickering blue and the artificial, comm-induced lines in their faces. “Finn? Finn. Please don’t die. Please don’t kill yourself. I’ll be there soon and I’ll go and sit with you. I -- I’m on my way back.”

“Rey. You have no idea how happy I am to hear that. I mean. Not that I’m unhappy here -- Poe and BB-8 are good company, they’re teaching me Binary and how the Resistance works -- but, but. I miss you.”

She wishes she could touch him, and she wishes she could touch Poe too. “I miss you both so much. I promise we’ll be there as soon as we can. I just hope we don’t run into any problems -- speaking of which, any news from the First Order?”

Again that stab of envy in her gut as Poe takes a long, noisy sip of caf before answering. “They’re being suspiciously quiet these days. We’re all taking shifts in Command, trying to find new information, trying to analyze the old information even when there’s very little left of it. We -- we think they’re still trying to regroup after that little mess at Starkiller, but who knows how long that’s going to last.”

“The First Order sent its best officers and ’troopers to Starkiller, so that loss means that they took a big hit in terms of their personnel,” Finn says.

“That sounds familiar,” Rey says, sadly. She clenches her hands into fists again.

“No, but you see, that’s the thing. Poe says we’re getting some information -- and we’re also getting wind of people wanting to join up. Maybe the neutral systems don’t want to be neutral any more, maybe the First Order’s starting to spook people. The General’s asked me to help, in case there are -- there are others like me.”

“I hope we can trust them,” Poe mutters. 

“I hope I can help you with that,” Rey says, after a moment. 

“Get here however you can, as soon as you can, Rey,” Finn says. He looks so worn but he’s alive, he’s awake, he can talk to her and sit up in his bed, and that’s more than enough for her. She can still see his blood, his wounds, in her nightmares. 

“I will. I -- I’ll bring you back some toto-pods.”

“Are you talking about food?” 

“Yes. Fruits. They’re really sweet and really delicious. I hope they’ll still be good to eat by the time we get there.”

“Take care, Rey,” Poe says. 

“Don’t drink all the caf while I’m gone,” she says, and the two of them on the other end laugh and that’s when the call ends.

“I don’t see how you can drink that stuff. Caf gives me headaches.”

 _Thump._ She should have recognized him by the sound of his footsteps. Had she been too distracted by the others to hear him? “Is that something you can do with the Force? I -- I didn’t hear you. Master.”

A tired, quiet chuckle. Metallic knuckles knocking against Artoo’s dome. “I think I still remember how to move aboard this lovely piece of junk,” he says. “I used to have to share quarters with Han, and with Leia, running for our lives. We’d spend weeks on board, and we had to learn how to live with each other. Walk around quietly when the others were trying to sleep. It’s a minor wonder no one died.”

It’s easier to hear Chewie’s footsteps, easier to hear his gruff laughter. As well as: _All packed up. Ready to go._

She leaps to her feet, then, and they shuffle around each other in the cramped space, but when they’re done she can see Master Luke settling down behind Chewie, and she only has to move her right elbow to know where Artoo is. 

She throws a comprehensive glance at the controls arrayed in front of her, a complex array of switches and jury-rigged bypasses and far too many blinking lights, and maybe it’s her imagination but she feels the weight of a gnarled old hand on her shoulder. 

Only for a moment, just, because she’s running through the ignition sequences and checking the shields and closing the cargo hatch, and now she has to shepherd the _Millennium Falcon_ through take-off maneuvers.

Chewie rumbles next to her: _Where are we going?_

“Oh, right, Poe said you’d know where Dosuun is.”

Brief affirmative bark.

“That’s where the new Resistance base will be.” She thinks for a moment. “Do you think we should do the same thing we did when we left D’Qar? Lay a false trail or two?”

_Bypass the main trade lanes, but get there quickly. We can do that._

She nods. “We’ll do it your way, Chewie.”

Odd, how she thinks she can smell the sprightly sharpness of cinn-lemons, how she craves mud-colored caf so much that she can almost taste its heaviness -- and Chewie gives her the signal, so she pulls back on the controls, and Ahch-To falls away.

six: Yavin 4 flapjacks

She’s finally beginning to wear a path in the green, sun-warmed grass -- a path that leads from the exit nearest her quarters to a low, flat outcropping of rock that lies beneath a tall, gnarled old tree. With no sea breezes to bend it one way or another it just reaches straight up into the bright sky of the oncoming morning, pale blue dotted with long banks of clouds shaped like endlessly marching sand dunes. 

A still morning. Three weeks since arrival. She’s finally gotten used to the day-night cycle. There has been no word from the First Order, which means that Leia still spends most of her waking hours haunting the corners of the new command center. Rey knows this because she has been bringing the General her daily cup of tea, and sometimes she has to look around in the dimmer corners, or -- and this makes her job easier -- find Artoo, who will now not apparently let Leia out of sensors’ reach. 

Tea later, she thinks as she scrambles onto the rock and wriggles, trying to get comfortable. Breakfast later. Morning meditations first. She can pour away the troubles of her jumbled, shifting dreams, or she can sort her questions out and look for the solutions that she needs. 

She sinks gratefully into the not-quite-silence that surrounds her. The whisper of the leaves in the trees, the murmur of little animals and insects moving in the grass. The occasional thrum and grumble of engines being fired up. Sometimes she can feel the looping flight patterns of X-wings and other starfighters as they streak past, far above. 

So few of them now, and she can sense the lingering sadness in those who remain, but she can also sense their lingering shock, and their slowly returning pride.

Because Luke Skywalker is back at the sticks of an X-wing, flying with Jessika and Temmin and Poe. They call him _Red Five_ when he’s teaching maneuvers or following them through new formations, and there’s something else to that callsign that she can’t place, some kind of respect that she’s familiar with from time around pilots.

Even the Admirals under Leia’s command carry that weight in their voices when they’re addressing Master Luke.

Now, deep in her meditation, she can hear and feel a set of engines as they soar over her in a long, stately arc. Whatever that ship is, it’s too big to be one of the starfighters, too small to be the _Falcon_. 

She tries to sort out her dreams: and in many of the recent ones she can still feel the bright hard clasp of arms around her shoulders. Poe, when she’d charged down the ramp and onto the tarmac of the landing bay; and Finn, when she’d nearly thrown herself through the doors to the medical quarters and landed right next to the bed in which he was recovering. Warmth of their skin, warmth of their smiles, and the weight of them, one on each side. Her hands in theirs, the three of them forming a circle, and in the spaces of her and them she can breathe freely and just be herself.

Other dreams.

Again and again that cry of _We’re coming!_ And she’d only started hearing it after two nights back -- nothing to fear in those words. A distant reassurance, coming closer and closer, speeding towards Dosuun. Finn had mentioned people wanting to join up. She’d spent her own time sitting in the command center, listening in with Admiral Statura’s permission, with Admiral Ackbar’s. Poe sending and receiving brief messages even from the other edge of the galaxy itself, messages that were not quite _Yes, we’ll help_ but were not outright rejections either.

She pours the constant anxious buzz of the base into the Force and lets quiet flow into her, lets the breezes and the little rustlings in the grass pass her by, and then -- 

Rey opens her eyes just a scant second before the warning klaxons blare out and shatter the morning -- and she draws a breath, she leaps off her rock, she grabs her staff from where she’d propped it up next to the nearest set of exit doors, and she runs, pell-mell past startled base personnel, to the quarters opposite hers. 

Finn in a hoverchair, pillows and cushions tucked in to support his spine, and she offers him her hand and they hurry as best as they can toward the command center, and Jessika Pava appears on Finn’s other side and she looks like mutinous thunderstorms on the move. “I knew I should have joined that recon flight, hells, I swear I’m never letting Black Leader out of my sight ever again -- ”

“So who went up with him?” Finn asks as they maneuver around a disheveled Lieutenant Connix. 

“We go up in threes most of the time, usually he takes me and Snap, but obviously I’m here on the ground, so we’re going to have to check the other X-wings -- ”

Rey takes a deep breath, reaches for the Force, and blinks. “He went up with Temmin and -- and Master Luke.”

Finn swears softly, but he sounds impressed, and so does Jessika. “Okay, so maybe he _did_ listen to reason this time -- that’s new -- but now I’ve got to get up there, don’t I?”

“Not yet,” Rey says, and they round the last corner and there’s the General, there’s Leia, and she turns and beckons them over with the slightest tilt of her head. 

“Black Leader?” Leia murmurs, and Rey can see the blinking lights of the general comm channel. “Rey and Finn and Pava are here, please recap for us.”

“Roger that, Command,” and Rey feels herself leaning in towards that familiar voice. “Red Five gave us the heads-up, we’ve got incoming signals, I count less than a dozen but that might be because the rest are taking a longer time to get here. Red Five?”

“Nothing hostile yet,” and Rey looks around at the others. Some of them seem calmed by Master Luke’s voice. Still, there are still too many frowns. Too many worried faces. “Closer, now, they should be dropping in soon.”

“Bad feeling about this.” Temmin Wexley. He sounds disgruntled. 

“Signals obtained,” Admiral Statura suddenly says from one of the other consoles. “Count three ships, likely to be freighters -- General, I can give the orders to go to battle stations -- ”

“Ready for battle stations, aye,” is Leia’s response. How can she be so calm? “But no one moves till I say so.”

“Copy that.”

Rey takes a deep breath, and another, and the air crackles with fear and bright electric emotions.

“Comms, we have incoming comms,” Admiral Ackbar suddenly says. “Confirming three freighters, they want an open channel.”

There’s a loud _click_ and then Leia is speaking again. “Incoming freighters. This is the Resistance. You should know we’ve been watching you come in. Identify yourselves.”

“Can you please check our backs, see if anyone’s been piggybacking on the signal? We’ve been looking all over for you, but we don’t want to bring the First Order to you! And we should have come to you sooner but there were a few more recruits than we had starfighters for.” A harried female voice, stern and sharply accented. “Is this General Leia Organa?”

Rey glances at her, shakes her head -- 

“Yes,” is all Leia says.

“Stars be thanked, you’re alive and the Resistance goes on. And -- I’m Iella Wessiri. Captain Wedge Antilles sends his regards. He should be on his way here, too, I hope.”

There’s a tug on Rey’s hand. Finn’s eyes are wide and startled. “Wedge Antilles. As in the other pilot who fought the Death Stars?”

“That’s him,” Jessika says. 

“How can we confirm that you are who you say you are?” Leia asks, and she is still the silent steady center of the room, and Rey feels that they are all caught and held securely in her orbit. 

“I can, or rather there are two of us up here who can.” And that’s Master Luke’s voice. “Iella. Does the name _Norra Wexley_ mean anything to you?”

“Snap’s mother, one of them,” Jessika mutters, and Rey nods thanks. Understanding glitters, elusive, along the edges of her mind.

“Yes. We’ve talked about flying TIE fighters, and -- there was something about an ejector seat?”

Near-identical snorts, one from Finn next to her and one from Poe out above the Dosuun atmosphere.

“Yes,” Master Luke says, and then: “Perhaps we’d do better to continue this conversation on the ground.”

“Not before I tell you what I brought,” Iella says. “Well. Aside from these freighters, obviously, but it’s what’s inside them that counts. And what’s inside them is: starfighters. I’m hoping you have pilots on the ground, or people already in pilot training? We’ve brought you everything we could throw together on short notice. Sixteen X-wings, a dozen each A- and Y-wings -- ”

And the rest of her words are drowned out in disbelieving cheers.

“That -- seriously -- that’s not what I was expecting.” Rey looks at an ashen-faced but grinning Jessika. “I thought we were going to have to run again. Or something worse.”

Behind Rey, Connix and some of the other aides have leapt into action, have started to call out orders and landing clearances, and the noise of the command center is eddying back into its usual busy hush -- though here and there she can still feel bursts of emotion. Shock and happiness and that swooping longing to _fly_ , to _fight_ \-- 

For a moment she thinks of the _Falcon_ , and she squeezes Finn’s hand, and he tugs her close to kiss her cheek. “That -- that’s a victory, no matter how you look at it, right?”

“If they’re really with us, yes,” she murmurs, brushing a return kiss across his knuckles. 

“Let’s go and meet Poe.”

And she smiles, feels that shock of sudden clean _victory_ clear down into her very toes, and she hurries out with him -- the tarmac is already buzzing with voices, already bright with a thousand words of welcome and a thousand smiles, sweeter and more dizzying and more powerful than caf and cinn-lemon tea and sweet toto-pods mixed together -- and she raises her voice just behind Finn’s as the black X-wing sweeps into a neat circle of a landing, the two of them whooping and stuck in place, and there’s an orange blur hurtling towards them and at its heels a round white shape -- 

Touch of approval and wistfulness as she senses Master Luke’s presence, coming and gently receding, and then she gives herself over to the warmth of Poe Dameron’s bright smile. 

“As much as I enjoy surprise presents, I _never_ want to be surprised like that again,” he exclaims, and she holds him carefully down to the ground, her hands around his wrists, so he’s steady on his feet. “It was tense up there, I promise you that.”

“We were nervous down here, too,” Finn says. “Is this what you Resistance people have to get used to? Every kind of emergency in the galaxy before you’ve had breakfast?”

Rey laughs when Poe grimaces. “That and there is not enough caf on this _planet_.” 

“Let’s get something, then,” she says -- but he pulls away from her and starts walking towards the officers’ quarters. “Poe?” 

“I’ve got a better idea. Come on.” 

BB-8 rolls up to them, then, beeping urgently. “You definitely want us to follow him,” she says.

“Why?” Finn asks. “Does Poe have food in his quarters?”

Brief sharp fanfare. “Something better than that,” Rey translates.

His hand, again, warm around hers, and behind her the new freighters are being swarmed by the rest of the base, and she wants to climb into a Y-wing -- she’s never really gotten to look at one of those before -- but there’s Poe, ahead of them, peeling off the top half of his orange flight suit as he goes, and then they’re in the cramped suite that he’s been assigned.

“You have a kitchen?” Finn asks, and Rey blinks, and hurries over to the nearest counter. 

“Yes, and you’re both welcome to it,” Poe says. She watches him rummage through a series of cabinets and shelves, and there’s more space for him to store things here, packages and compact little boxes and even a little basket full of berries and other fruit, glistening even in the harsh overhead lights. 

“You cook,” Finn says, next. “Of course you do. Why am I not surprised.”

Poe doesn’t reply.

The tips of his ears turn, slowly, a very dark pink.

Rey laughs.

“Shoo,” Poe says, but he’s smiling as he gently ushers her back to the other side of the counter. What a sight he makes, still shivering and still flight-silly, and she watches him thrust the falling waves of his helmet-tousled hair back from his face -- and then he pulls out a knife.

“We’re not breakfast, are we,” Finn says, hands up and face contorted in comical alarm.

Rey copies his pose and grins.

“No, but I’m _making_ it,” Poe says, and his hands never stop moving, even as he speaks. “This is -- this is something I learned, when I was growing up, and sometimes if I was lucky I’d be able to wake up before my dad, and I’d make breakfast for him, because he always spent so much time looking after me and this, this was what I’d try to do for him.”

He stills, for a moment, hands down on the counter, and Rey thinks she can feel the ache that he must be carrying around with him -- she can feel it, sharp and kind and sweet, and holding her in place -- and she can’t understand it. Oh, she knows the word, she can taste its sounds on her tongue, but the _feeling_ behind his words is something that she knows she can’t grasp.

Maybe not yet, she thinks, and the Force brings her a sense of Leia as she meets with Iella Wessiri and her people; of Master Luke and his surprised laughter as he strides into the forest with Artoo at his side. The Force brings her the wonder in Finn’s eyes and the easy movements of Poe’s hands, and even the quiet contented hum that is BB-8 settling into its charging station. 

Finn is speaking, bringing her back to the here and now. “Flapjacks.”

“Not just any flapjacks,” and Rey very carefully doesn’t step back as Poe swings the knife recklessly in their direction. “Yavin 4 flapjacks, which are the best in the galaxy and don’t you ever let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“I don’t even know what flapjacks are, fly-boy, I can’t really think of any point of comparison here.”

Poe groans and grins at the same time. “You’ve been spending too much time around the General, she’s the only one who calls me that.”

“It’s a pretty good word for people like you,” Finn says, laughing.

“Well now you’re going to be outnumbered by people like me,” Poe says.

But Rey is more focused on his movements and their results: there’s a pan on the heat, and it crackles quietly as it warms, as it comes up to temperature. The knife in Poe’s hand flashes as he slices up some of the fruit and throws the cut pieces into a nearby bowl. Rapid whip, Poe making short work of the liquid contents of another bowl, which he pours into the pan; a neatly twisting swirling motion and: “Watch this,” he says.

He loosens the contents of the pan with a quick tap, the heel of his hand against the handle, and then he _flips_ those contents, a thin layer that’s pale on one side and golden-brown on the other -- he makes the catch look easy, flips it again and then he slides that floppy thing onto the prepared bowl of fruit. “Finn, that’s yours.”

Another bowl of fruit, another thin golden-brown layer in the rough shape of a circle -- and a third. A few minutes for each completed dish and then Poe passes out utensils. “Try it,” he says.

She trusts him.

Against the just-cooked flapjack -- she supposes that was what he was making in the pan -- and with that toasty heat the fruit melts a little, collapses into a fragrant heap of juices and pulp and the welcome grit of tiny seeds, and there’s no need for any other sweeteners, nothing else but this harmony, fruit and flapjack and the contemplative smile on Poe’s face, the eager movements of Finn’s hand, and Rey knows it’s all right for her to wolf down her share, to scoop up mushy bits of fruit with her fingers, to use the last piece of flapjack to wipe the bowl clean.

She knows that Poe won’t mind if she reaches out to him with juices clinging to her fingertips, with little seeds trapped between their palms.

“What else do you cook?” Finn says, wide eyes and fruit-stained mouth and all.

Poe grins, and Rey can’t help but lean towards him.

seven: homebrews

In the stillness of the Force, in the shivering quiet of her mind, she remembers to breathe, and she remembers to keep her guard up.

Blast shield down over her eyes, and the thick walls of the helmet stopping most sounds from reaching her ears, and Rey’s lost track of the number of training remotes. Not the important part, she thinks; the important part is to move with them, move past them, anticipate where they might be firing at her and move out of the way.

Deep breath. Here is the soft shriek of an incoming strike; she rolls forward and immediately jumps as high as she can, knees drawn up to avoid the second bolt. 

In her mind she sees the sands of Jakku, infinite dunes to the horizon, and at least the ground beneath her feet here is much more stable. Sand would slip and shift and slide, and here she doesn’t have to worry about that.

There, there, incoming bolts, three of them all at once, and she leaps forward, whirls into a front aerial and then somersaults back to land on one hand.

The signal. She has to wait for the signal. No lightsabers until then. Just her instincts, just the Force as it flowed through her, as it told her what would happen, just heartbeats ahead.

The words turn and turn in her head and mark time for her steps: the first thing that Master Luke had taught her. Words that other younglings had learned before her, and the Force brings her their voices, calling to her, encouraging.

_Emotion, yet peace._   
_Ignorance, yet knowledge._   
_Passion, yet serenity._   
_Chaos, yet harmony._   
_Death, yet the Force._

She whispers the words and she runs, she ducks, she drops flat to the ground and leaps back to her feet, and she waits for the signal. Patience, patience, the long hard-won hard-fought patience that she’d learned through hundreds of tally-mark days, the unchanging sands and the worn-down hope and -- 

“Now,” Master Luke says, a quiet powerful push.

Weight leaping into her two hands, and the tell-tale _snap-hiss_ , and now she’s not running from the stunning bolts any more: now she seeks them out and catches them on her blade. It’s against the rules to deflect the bolts because there’s an audience, there always is, and those beings are not going to get hit. 

Every bolt that she catches sizzles and splashes on impact, and she can feel the heat of dissipating energy, blooming against her skin, against her arms and her wrists.

Swing, swing, duck, dodge, swing, and -- suddenly, there’s nothing. Calm, instead of the mad whirling motions of the training remotes, but she stays in ready position, and the steady thrum of the lightsaber is soothing and strange.

“Stop, and hold,” and those are the familiar words to signal the end of a drill, but someone else is speaking. “Put your ’saber up, Rey.”

She does, and she takes her helmet off as well. 

Twin presences in the Force.

“Good work,” Master Luke says. A brief nod. “Your response times are getting better and better with every passing day. Shorter swings, like we discussed; use your energy efficiently. With the staff you have to compensate for the momentum generated by its length. With a lightsaber you don’t have to; you simply have to put the blade in the right place, every time. Let the weapon do the work for you, whenever possible.”

“Yes, Master,” Rey says, and she lets herself smile, a little, at the approval in his eyes.

“May I add something?” Leia says, after a moment.

“Certainly,” is Master Luke’s reply. 

So Rey stands up a little straighter. Pays a little more attention.

The Force brings her the sound of Master Luke’s rueful, quiet chuckling, and the affectionate acerbity in Leia’s eyes.

“Maybe train in close-quarters combat as well. Sometimes we get to choose the places where we fight, and sometimes those places are chosen for us, and I’m thinking you might not always have space to swing.”

“Narrow spaces have always been the enemy,” Master Luke murmurs, amused and also gently sad.

Rey is not the only one with a vivid memory of a body impaled on red.

And she bites at her words before she can speak, before they can all plunge into sorrow, and -- 

“Rey,” says a new voice.

“Luke!” Another new voice.

The change in Master Luke is startling: the lines in his face deepen, but not with the weight of mourning -- suddenly he’s grinning and turning around, and suddenly he’s being caught up in the most boisterous of embraces, nearly violent back-thumping affection that makes even Leia laugh out loud. 

“Wedge!”

“Womp rat!” 

And Rey turns to the woman who’s appeared beside her, her golden hair in a tight coil wound around her head. “Do I want to know what a womp rat is?”

Iella Wessiri laughs and shakes her head. “I’ve never been to Tatooine, so I don’t actually know if there really is such a thing -- all I know is that Wedge has always called Master Skywalker that.”

“You -- you and Wedge? That’s him? He’s here? He’s with you?” Rey blinks, when the Force whispers to her. “You’re _with_ him.”

“He just got here and I’m glad of it -- and yes, yes, we have something,” Iella says, shrugging, and the movement of her shoulder shapes the words that she doesn’t say. “We stay in the same places when we can, and we think of each other when we have to be apart. Do we have a relationship? Yes we do. What kind? That’s just for us. You read me?”

“Loud and clear, I think,” Rey says, and she thinks about Finn and Poe, who are not on Dosuun now. They are participating in recon-and-training flights with some of the new starfighters, the new pilots. 

It is easy to hold Finn’s hand, and it is easy to lean against Poe’s shoulder. She never objects when one of them wants to sleep in her bunk. They don’t chase her out when she stumbles into their rooms after a hard day of running and meditating and drilling. She can’t get enough of the things that Poe likes to cook, and she likes to tease Finn about volunteering for what he called KP duty. 

She feels _warm_ with them, the good kind of warm, like a hammock and the right number of blankets to sleep beneath, in the heart of a cold desert night.

“Something, we have something,” she murmurs, and then Iella catches her sleeve and tugs. “Yes?” Rey asks, sweaty and swaying with a sweet truth nestled quietly beneath her heart.

“Do you drink?”

She blinks at Iella. “Tea? Caf? Yes. I don’t like Mandalorian blackfruit very much. They make wine out of it on Jakku, and it tastes horrible.”

“Not talking about any of those. Come on.”

Connix hurries past when they turn a corner, and she says, “I’ll be right with you, I just need to deliver some data chips to Admiral Statura.”

“Hurry or we’ll start without you,” Iella says.

“Start?” Rey asks, scrubbing the sweat off her face with one of her sleeves. 

“Moonshine,” Iella says as she knocks on a door. “Hooch. Illegally acquired or brewed alcoholic spirits?”

“Oh,” Rey says. “Are we drinking tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Someone has to volunteer to comm the medical quarters,” Rey says, thinking about the last time she’d gotten anything to drink, the chemical burn in her throat and the bitter pounding headache that had caused her to huddle helplessly in her hammock the next morning. “In case someone has a bad reaction to the stuff.”

Iella laughs. “Will it make you feel better if I told you the hooch came from Kalonia?”

“The doctor? Yes,” and Rey laughs, too, and follows Iella through a door -- into a room full of animated chatter. She recognizes some of the faces.

“Rey!” Jessika squeals, and she laughs and returns the enthusiastic hug. “How is it we’ve never invited you to drink with us?”

“Too busy trying to survive,” Rey says with a quiet chuckle. Her reward is not a blank stare, or a hostile growl -- her reward is a solemn nod and a small glass, full of a vaguely greenish liquid. 

“And because you’re still alive to drink with the rest of us: bottoms up,” Jessika says.

Scent of torn grass, and the taste of -- strangely enough -- toto-pods mixed with something that tastes very much like Poe’s favorite kind of berries. Nothing mild about it, but it does leave her tongue coated with a faint wash of bitter medicinal stinging. “Ugh, what is that, and I want another shot.”

“Hey, hey, don’t get too far ahead of yourself,” Connix says as she comes in, trailed by Doctor Kalonia and a few other pilots.

There’s a chorus of greetings and laughter and not a few spilled drinks, and Rey scrambles into a chair with Jessika as Iella jumps onto one of the few tables. “Hello, hello,” Iella says, waving her hands for silence. “Have we all been introduced, here?”

“No,” Connix shouts, half-full glass in hand. “Who the kriff are you?”

Iella laughs loudest of all and says, “I only brought you a few starfighters, I don’t know, I guess that doesn’t count for much these days? Anyway, we’re here, we’ll live to fight another day, we’re due for a little celebration, I think. So I want you to meet my friends, and we’ll drink a toast to fighting the First Order. You with me?”

“Yes,” Rey says, along with the others.

And Iella reels off a list of names, pointing to various faces around the room: Plourr Estillo, Elscol Loro, Feylis Ardele, Koyi Komad, Tyria Sarkin, Shalla Nelprin, Dia Passik. 

“A toast to new pilots,” Jessika says, solemnly.

Someone passes Rey a bottle of something sickly-smelling, and she bravely gulps a generous mouthful down, and it tastes like cinn-lemons and cream. It makes her laugh. “Oh,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“You’ve never had the good stuff before?”

Rey shakes her head. “No such thing on Jakku.”

Kalonia takes a long swig before passing the bottle back. “Then hold on to that. And there’s more where it came from.”

“Thank you.”

And now it’s Jessika’s turn to point to the women in the crumpled off-duty suits. Adra Ghast, Ienne Ferr, Joss Montyet, Ilana Nightingale, Anorra Thei, Velin Vella. 

Rey knocks the neck of her bottle against the rim of Connix’s glass as she finishes another circuit of the room. “I want to know how you do your hair like that,” Connix says.

“It’s just -- loops,” Rey murmurs, and it takes her a long time to find the last word, which is silly, because she hasn’t even really started drinking yet, but she’s already a little warm. A tingling in her knees, in her elbows, out the tips of her fingers. Not the Force, is that the Force? No, it comes and goes with the laughter that rises and falls around her.

“Stand up,” Kalonia suddenly says.

“Me?” Rey blinks, and hops to her feet, and has to put her free hand on the nearest shoulder -- Montyet pats her arm -- and she’s facing all the others. A room full of women, a room full of fighters, pilots and ground personnel alike. She wants to smile at them, and instead what comes out of her mouth is: “Can anyone here tell me about Dosmit Raeh?” 

Silence, and then: “How do you know that name?”

Rey crosses the room, carefully, picking her way around the others, to an ashen-faced Jessika. “I found her helmet on Jakku.”

The women murmur, sad and respectful at the same time. 

“So that’s where she ended up. The squad talked about her all the time -- they didn’t like not knowing where their CO had died -- ”

Rey bites her lip. “I only found her helmet in the sands. I never saw her fighter. You knew her?”

A nod. “I was going to be seconded to her squad. Never got to fly with them, though. The Resistance came calling. But I put their patch on my helmet. I wanted to remember them, remember her.”

“Thank you -- you’re Rey, right?” 

Rey blinks, and nods up at the Twi’lek woman, who says, “I’m Dia Passik. Dosmit was one of the best. She’d give Black Leader a run for his credits if we hadn’t lost her. We were -- we were friends, after a fashion.”

“She means,” Iella says as she throws back another shot, “that she and Dosmit cleared out a couple of bars a couple of times. Force help you if you got handsy around their people.”

“No one touches me, or my friends, without express permission,” Dia says, her lekku waving emphatically from side to side. “Dosmit and I, we thought the same way.”

“Plus it’s fun to beat the spit out of empty-skulled fools,” Jessika says.

Rey grins, and thinks of her staff.

“Dosmit’s family’s been searching for her for a long time,” Dia continues. “Thanks to you I can let them know where she came to rest.”

And Rey feels tears prick at the corners of her eyes. Family, she thinks, and she looks around and maybe these women can be family to her too. 

So she says, “I guess I’d like to drink a toast to Dosmit Raeh,” and the others nod, and raise their drinks, solemnly.

eight: bread and oil and salt

She thinks she hears Finn say, “I think I might be getting better at this.”

It’s hard to make the words out. She’s on her hands and knees in a crawlspace, and there are wires sparking and sending up sharp acrid smoke, and how is this the story of her life? Jakku is long behind her, and good riddance to a life of scant rations for actually good and working spare parts -- but here she is, _still_ looking for spare parts because she’s only gone and landed herself one of the best ships in the galaxy.

And it’s only one of the best ships in the _kriffing_ galaxy because it’s being held together by sparking wires and spare parts and not a little hope.

“Hold together, girl,” she murmurs under her breath. No time to yelp at the scorching arc that briefly glowingly connects her fingertips to the mess of wires just below her eye-level. No time to consider other alternatives -- she’ll just go with the one that’ll work the most quickly. “Do you hear me? Hold together.” And: “Finn, the blue tape please. The whole roll. I don’t know how much of this I’ll have to re-insulate.” 

There’s a concerned roar from somewhere right above her. She flicks a glance up, and catches a glimpse of nimble feet and sheaths for a set of very wickedly curved claws. “I’m always careful, Chewie, it’s this ship that keeps on spitting out one problem after another.”

_We wanted to do so much with it. Tear out the engines, give it something better. More space to carry goods in._

“I have no objections to any of that -- ow -- ” She grits her teeth and lets her pain flow out of her, and then she eyes the latest patch of singed hair on her forearm and sighs. “Also, while we’ve managed to get the ventral cannon unstuck, I’m always up for more guns. But you know, I think it might be dangerous to overhaul this rust-bucket _while we’re in transit_.”

“We are _not_ doing anything like that,” Finn says, the words running together in his hurry and his worry, and she sighs in relief when Chewie groans agreement. 

Again she recoils from the myriad stinks of the crawlspaces, and she’s only too happy to recheck the wires for structural integrity so she can _get out_.

Finn wrinkles his nose when she emerges, and she sighs and pushes her hair away from her face, and asks, “That bad?”

“Worked in sanitation, remember,” is his reply. “If I tell you something smells really bad, _it smells really bad_.” And: “Is the _Falcon_ all right? Are you?”

She thumps her battered fist against a bulkhead as she trudges back toward the tiny ’fresher. “I hope Poe knows something else about Corellian freighters aside from how to jimmy their ID transponders. I want advice and I want a bath.” 

And right on cue, her stomach growls. 

“And also, food,” Finn says. “Wash up and I’ll see what I can find in our supplies.”

Running water on a ship is still a profound mystery to her, as well as a source of wonder, and she scrubs her knuckles one more time before reluctantly drying her hands off, and heading to the cockpit. 

No droids on the _Falcon_ today. Artoo’s guarding Leia back on the base, and BB-8 and Poe are flying _Black One_ together, and ship-to-ship comms will have to wait until they all drop out of hyperspace.

They’re supposed to be heading for Naboo, looking to meet up with some of the General’s contacts as well as one or two new pilots, people who had been lucky enough to be off Hosnian Prime when it was lost -- and as she sinks into the pilot’s chair she glances nervously at her own stained and battered sleeves, at the ragged threads trailing off of her trousers, at the scuff-marks and muddy spots on her boots. “I’m not exactly dressed to visit a palace.”

A step behind her, and then: “Do you think I might be?” Food on a tray, and confusion in Finn’s face. “I don’t even know _anything_ about Naboo. But the General says that it was the Emperor’s home planet. She says -- she says her birth mother comes from there.” He shakes his head as he sits down. “Still so many things that I need to learn. It’s like there’s no end to all this new information I have to remember, to understand.”

She nods. “That’s what it feels like for me, too. What’ve we got?”

He passes her a chunk of bread and a small dish. “There’s not much, but the requisitions people told me they were still waiting for new shipments to come in.”

The bread is still warm to the touch, a huge chunk of it, bigger than both of her fists put together. Orange-brownish crust on top with lingering traces of fine off-white powder. An even distribution of largish holes in the crumb, giving the bread an airy appearance despite the actual weight of it in her hand. She sniffs the bread, and thinks that there’s a muted sweetness to the scent.

Next she looks at the dish, precariously balanced on her knee. A yellow-greenish oil, and in the center a tiny heap of crystals, gray and white and pink mixed all together. “What is it?” she asks, after a moment.

“There was a woman in the mess hall,” Finn says as he breaks his chunk of bread into smaller pieces. “She said that when her people went on long journeys they would always take a meal like this, to eat at the first place where they stopped. I think she said it was for good luck? There’s bread, and an oil that they press from the seeds of some fruit, and they mix edible salt with the oil.”

She watches him demonstrate: he takes a smaller chunk of bread and dips it carefully into his dish of oil, wiping the excess off on the rim of the dish before popping the chunk into his mouth. “It’s delicious,” he says, after chewing and swallowing. “The bread is really good, and the oil and the salt make it taste even better.”

Her first mouthful turns into a second, and then into a third. The bread dissolves easily into crumbs on her tongue, and the sharp edges of the salt crystals are smoothed by the crisp-scented oil. She makes herself eat slowly. 

“Is this all of the bread?” she asks, eventually, after glancing at green lights across the _Falcon_ ’s board. 

“No, there’s another loaf.”

“We can share it with Poe when he gets on board, because he’s traveling with us, too.”

“We should give Chewie some, then.”

“I don’t think he’d appreciate it,” she says, shaking her head gently. “Wookiees have different ideas when it comes to bread.”

“Oh. All right. I’ll learn that, too.” She reaches out to him, to the nervous movement of his throat as he swallowed. “I promise I’m getting used to being around all sorts of beings. Which means paying attention to what they eat and what they don’t -- ”

“And to how they look at water, how they use it,” Rey murmurs. “I think I understand, I mean it’s not just through the Force that I’m aware it of it but -- you know, isolated people living on a mostly isolated desert world.”

He smiles, and she meets his hand halfway. “Wonder what Poe would think of us, if he’d been listening in.”

Rey would answer, but -- oh. They’re almost at the first rendezvous point. “Chewie, we’re dropping out of hyperspace,” she calls over her shoulder, and she gets a comprehensive answer of a roar as she dusts bits of bread from her hands and grasps at levers -- 

The comm crackles to life, between her and Finn.

“ -- and I was just telling my buddy over here, wouldn’t it be nice if I could transfer over for a quick lunch, or dinner, or whatever meal it is I’m supposed to be eating right now, because I keep forgetting that traveling through hyperspace makes me hungry,” Poe is saying, and Rey has to cover her laugh with her hand. “Hey, _Falcon_ , why aren’t you big enough to park an X-wing in?”

“And where would I put the likes of you,” she laughs. “We can barely fit Finn into the cargo berths.”

“Finn? Are you there? I think Rey’s insulting you.”

Rey’s grin widens when Finn winks at her. “Sorry, Poe, can’t hear you, I’m kind of wedged into one of those things Han called hidey-holes.”

“Oh, so that’s how it is. You’re insulting that ship?” Poe’s laughter is bright and welcome and warm. “We’re switching as soon as we land. I’m taking the _Falcon_ with me, and you two can cram yourselves into this X-wing’s cockpit. But seriously, I’m hungry, are you sure you can’t send me anything to eat?”

“I really wish we could,” she tells him, gently. “First thing we’ll do when we land, we’re stuffing you full of this good bread Finn brought on board.”

“Don’t forget the salt and the oil, that’s important,” Finn says. 

“Can’t forget that -- hold that thought, we have incoming.” Poe sounds steely, now, gone the laughter and the teasing from his voice. “Let’s hope it’s the _Fambaa Flock_ and not, I don’t know, First Order jerks.”

Switches for the shields on her left-hand console. Rey peers out the front screens as Finn and Chewie rearrange themselves in the cockpit, hands tensing -- 

“X-wing starfighter, Corellian freighter,” and there’s an elderly female voice speaking on open comms. “You’re -- well, you’re not exactly in restricted space, but you _are_ at the coordinates that I’ve been sent. I hope you’re the beings I’m looking for.”

“May we have your name, ma’am?” Poe asks. “We’re looking for someone who used to be interested in herding, ah, tusk cats.”

“That’s me,” the elderly female voice says with a quiet laugh. “That was a long, long time ago. I’m afraid I wouldn’t even be able to live with a domesticated one these days, the fur gives me rashes.” A quiet throat-clearing. “My name is Pooja Naberrie. I used to serve in the Imperial Senate. Did my colleague send you?”

“She did, Senator Naberrie,” Poe says. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“And I yours, X-wing starfighter. Corellian freighter, you’ve a very familiar shape to these old eyes.”

Rey sniffs at the air in the cockpit. The smell of battered old leather, as from a jacket that had been worn on far too many trips. She takes it in and says, “Senator Naberrie, we’re pleased to meet you, and -- and it’s our honor to take this familiar ship and keep on fighting, in your name and for the sake of freedom for all in the galaxy.”

“I see my colleague has found many good beings to join her in fighting the good fight.” Soft quiet laughter. “Did I not have the restraints I do now, I would take up arms as well and join you. No matter. I send you my group’s resources, my family’s, in the hope that my colleague, _my friend_ , will find a use for them, and keep going despite the odds.”

 _Incoming,_ Chewie roars, and Rey glances at him: he’s intent on one of the _Falcon_ ’s computers. Several chunks of data, and the file names scroll too rapidly for her to read, but after a moment the Wookiee roars again. 

“The _Fambaa Flock_ ’s powering up to leave,” Finn says after a moment. 

“Transfer complete?” Poe asks.

“I -- I think we have everything,” Rey says as Chewie nods. 

“Thank you, Senator,” Poe says on the comms. 

“May the Force be with you all,” is the response, and then Rey’s watching the _Fambaa Flock_ disappear into hyperspace.

“How important is she?” Rey mutters.

“Very.” She can hear the tension still lingering in Poe’s sigh. “Pooja Naberrie, who served in the Imperial Senate until that body was dissolved at the fall of the Galactic Empire. Naberrie, as in the family of Padme who ruled Naboo as Amidala. That woman is the General’s first cousin.”

“Oh,” Rey says. “That makes her Master Luke’s cousin, too.”

“Yes.”

“But she called Leia her colleague, her friend.”

“Even after Padme Naberrie died her family chose to keep the connection to the Skywalkers hidden,” Poe says. “I only ever got the story in bits and pieces when I was still part of the New Republic. They said neither senator was aware of their actual family ties until late in the Galactic Civil War. More than that, I’ve no idea. Maybe you could try asking the General.”

“More than happy to stick with just the bits and pieces of the story, thanks,” Finn says.

“Yeah, buddy, you and me both. But look on the bright side, that’s one of our mission objectives completed -- that is, if we have the right information.”

Next to Rey, Chewie groans an affirmative. _Names of possible contacts, access codes to some of the Naberrie family bank accounts, locations of supply caches. All of these could be helpful, if they’re proven to be genuine._

“And that’s the first thing we’ll need to do as soon as we get home,” Rey says as she fires up the _Falcon_ ’s engines again. “One mission objective down, Poe, how do we get to the next one?”

nine: fish head stew

When she wakes up from her dreams the night-shadows in her room are beginning to turn pale gray, and she peers through the translucent curtains to catch a glimpse of distant purple-bluish dawn over green-dark seas.

Another aquatic planet, but where Ahch-To had felt isolated and empty, here on Intkga Rey can feel the active currents of the Force as it surges, as it cascades all around her. 

Outside the series of rustic cottages on the seafront that their current hosts have put them up in, she can hear the sleepy cries of night-flying birds, and she thinks they might be flying home, if they’re turning toward the rising suns. 

Three suns and five moons, and an entire sheer rock face cut and carved over the centuries into a sprawl of a small city: and now she can see why Poe had described this particular spot as a tourist destination. Flying the _Falcon_ towards its current berth, it had been all Rey could do to pay attention to the controls once she saw the levels cut into the rock, once she saw the winding lines of staircases, once she saw the beings happily thronging those dangerous heights.

She can _understand_ the appeal of perching a city over a beautiful ocean, with clear water and powerful waves and the never-quiet winds -- but there’s a part of her that still quails, a little, whenever she has to step out of her room. 

So she swallows down the instinct to run -- toward the water or away from it -- and she opens the door to the outside of the little house. She carefully threads the path that leads to Finn’s quarters. She shivers in the wind and -- 

A human presence, close by, and an absolute mess of dark hair stuck up every which way.

“Poe,” she says, and she can see the round form of BB-8 bobbing just behind the pilot’s legs. “BB-8.”

“Morning,” Poe says.

“Eh?”

“I must still be running on Dosuun time, my body thinks it’s time for me to eat breakfast.”

She thinks of the beginning of the day cycle on Dosuun, and the sleepy shuffling lines into the mess halls, and the steam rising from the tea in her blue cup. But the cup is at the base and she’s here in some other part of the galaxy, and last night she’d learned to her dismay that Intkga was one of the few worlds that didn’t drink tea.

It had been all she could do not to send a message to Leia. But then what would she have said? 

She peers at Poe, instead, and she frowns and reaches to scrub at a dark patch on his cheek. “You went all the way down to your landing bay before coming back up here?”

She feels him start, and feels him sigh, and when he sways tiredly in her direction it’s easy to fit her shoulder against his upper arm, propping him up. 

“Maybe I’m not getting enough sleep, these days,” he says, after a silence that stretches long enough for the stars in the sky above them to start winking out.

“Or ever,” Rey says, gently. “I told you to speak to Master Luke about your -- your dreams.”

He shakes his head. “I’m busy, and so is he. He’s nearly as finicky about X-wing upgrades as Jess is.”

And she thinks of all the times she’d seen those craggy features concentrating over starfighter blueprints, and nods. “He’s trying to be useful.”

“And so am I.” 

She’s close enough to see the dark shadow as it flits across his face, and she takes his hand and tugs him back toward her quarters. 

“Rey.” But he doesn’t fight the momentum of her steps.

BB-8 doesn’t enter the rooms: instead, it chirps at Rey and then starts rolling in a slow patrolling circle. 

Straight to her bed she leads Poe, and she points him to the foot while she arranges herself comfortably next to her rumpled pillows. “Sit down,” she says, gently. 

“I’ve never been one for meditating,” he starts.

“We’re not meditating.” Rey closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath. “We’re -- we’re thinking about flying. That’s different.”

Rustling, and she thinks she can _hear_ it when he scratches the back of his head, but after a moment she can hear the steady rhythm of his breathing, in and out. 

She creates the scene in her mind, and fills in the details: the oversized co-pilot’s chair. The specific settings for the gravity and inertial compensators. The faint lingering scent of Wookiee fur, and fibers snagged everywhere. Stretching, just a little, to grab the necessary levers to power up for flight. 

“Rey, I can feel that -- ”

“Good,” she whispers, “come fly with me.” 

Poe’s Force-presence wraps around her, slowly and tentatively at first, and then she can almost feel that it’s her hands clasped around the sticks: she can feel the X-wing’s cockpit and its myriad control surfaces, and she can see misty dawn skies out the canopy, and she can even hear astromech-droid chattering computations even though she knows exactly where BB-8 is right now -- 

An intricate twist looping into a barrel roll, and then long lazy somersaults in the sky, rapid flick and shimmy and then the stomach-churning plunge of an extended spiral of a dive -- 

Some part of her mind must have been ticking over the mathematics of X-wing maneuvers, but it’s hard to pay attention to it, when all of her feelings are inextricably bound up into the brave weightlessness of flight, into the sheer power of pushing away from the ground and just rising, rising -- 

She laughs. She can’t help it.

And she opens her eyes to his bright grin, to the radiant light in his eyes and the warmth of his hand on her arm. “Is meditating really like that?”

“It can be, for you,” she says, and she presses her fingertips against his skin.

“And you? What’s it like?”

“Sandstorms,” she says, without thinking. “Walking through sandstorms and not feeling the sharp winds. The sand biting. It’s -- familiar. I know what a sandstorm looks like and feels like and sounds like. I know that it smells like heated rocks.” 

“I _saw_ a sandstorm, from very far away, those couple of days I spent on Jakku,” he says, after a long moment. “It looked dangerous. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. And we’re talking about, I guess it was a small one, and it was far away and nowhere near headed for my location at the time. But it was -- frightening.”

“Sandstorms are easier to understand than people. The chance meeting of sand and wind and the earth, when it opens up and releases what it’s holding within.” She swings her legs around and slides off her bed onto the floor. The sheets are cool against her shoulders, against the back of her neck. “I couldn’t predict them, no one on Jakku could, but you had to learn how to survive them, if you wanted to see another day.”

She feels the bed shift and creak, and she feels him cram in next to her -- strange how he does that, strange how she welcomes it, when there’s space in the room to stretch out and just _occupy_ \-- and she lets him put his head on her shoulder. 

“I’m starting to think that I should probably be learning more about you and, and Finn,” he says, and his voice is low and candid and it makes her shiver, because he’s so sharp out in the air and he’s so gentle, here next to her.

“I want to learn more about you,” she says, in return.

“Ask me questions,” Poe says.

And she would, except -- her stomach chooses that moment to growl, quietly.

“I don’t suppose you found somewhere to eat while you were off visiting your X-wing,” she says. 

“I did, actually. Come on.”

She lets him pull her up to her feet. 

She says, as she crosses the threshold, “BB-8, could you please go to Finn and tell him we’ll be back with breakfast?”

One of the suns has almost completely risen -- a source of pale silver light hovering just above the deceptively gentle dance of the waves -- and she turns away from those twin expanses, from the great soaring sky and the great stretch of the sea. It gets easier as they thread a series of frail-looking stone steps: suddenly she can smell spices and a sharper take on caf, wide-awake faces wreathed in the steam rising from deep pots with massively rotund bellies.

“Breakfast, gentles?” one of the women asks, and Rey glances at Poe, who nods and reaches into his pocket for a credit chip. “Very generous of you.”

“What are you cooking?” Rey asks.

She’s expecting the woman to talk; she’s not expecting the woman to smile, and pick up a nearby dish. A beaten-and-bent ladle, and a cloudy reddish broth flecked with chopped greens, and -- 

An entire fish head.

Sharp teeth protrude from its lower jaw, and its staring eye is a stark milky white, and there are distinct streaks of red in its skin, in the spines sticking out of its cheek.

She tries to smile her thanks. She’s not sure what she’s supposed to do with the head.

“Rey,” Poe says, gently.

Flat baked bread on the table, uneven ragged discs browned in spots. Rey copies Poe’s movements: tear off a piece of bread and dip it into the broth. Bright spices splash across her tongue, hot enough to seize attention, hot enough to clamor in her nose, but not painful at all. She feels warmer with each mouthful, and dips up more broth. 

Next: bare hands, bare fingers. Like Poe, she peels chunks of flaky white flesh off the spines and bones of the fish head, and picks through each bit for stray sharp edges before popping it into her mouth. A rich clean sweet taste, contrasted by the rest of the dish. 

“This is the best part,” he assures her, so she tries the eye of the fish: she scoops it out of its socket and picks at the gelatinous material that had held it in place -- and when she puts those pieces into her mouth she thinks she tastes salt and spice, and the waters in which the fish might have lived. 

The woman smiles and nods approval when Poe says, “We have a friend, and we’ll bring him here too, so he can try this.”

Still mostly doing as Poe does, Rey gradually breaks the fish head down into translucent planes, into ragged edges. She runs her fingernails along the hard surfaces, looking for stray bits of flesh. Her skin catches on the bones in some spots, but she doesn’t cut herself. The broth’s left a yellow-orange tinge on her fingertips. 

She looks up at the woman, just before Poe gets to his feet. “Is it possible to make this with, with different fish?”

“Yes, you can. But it will taste different, if you make it with fish from other places.”

“Thank you,” Rey says, and she trails after Poe, and when Finn’s quarters are in sight, she asks, “Can you tell me about those other worlds where people eat fish?”

ten: chocolate cake

Before the sharp little prod can make contact with her skin she’s slapping the light blanket off and she’s reaching for her staff -- but then the rolling round shape next to her resolves into BB-8, and she’s left blinking and badly startled. “What are you even doing here?”

A series of indignant beeps and boops. 

“Updated mission objectives,” she sighs. “Sorry I scared you.”

A quick visit to the ’fresher, and a change of clothes. The metallic scent of recycled and refiltered air clings stubbornly to the jacket she’d received from Leia so many months ago. No time to wash her hair, and she thinks the _Falcon_ ’s systems might not be up to providing enough water for a shower anyway. 

How is it that in only a few months she has learned to look forward to showers?

Neither Poe nor Finn are smiling when she sits between them, so she kisses them on their foreheads and joins the collective frown. “I’ve been told we can’t go home just yet.”

Poe, on her left, groans. “Yeah. Got a comm from Dosuun. It’s a bit garbled, but the thing is, it didn’t come from the General; it came from Skywalker. Old friend of his, and we’re supposed to be escorting him back, or he’s giving us some things we might need, or something. I have no idea.”

“We’ve asked for confirmation,” Finn adds. “So far, the first response has been the coordinates. We’re waiting to see if there’ll be anything else.”

She thinks, briefly, of the reunion between her master and the pilot Wedge Antilles. “It feels kind of strange to think of Master Luke having friends, even though I already met one of those.”

“You’re talking about Antilles, right?” Poe says, and he perks up, if only a little. “I got to fly with him a couple of times before we left. Hard to believe he’s not a Jedi, when he flies rings around Skywalker!”

“I didn’t think there was anyone like that,” Finn says.

“You were there, weren’t you?” Poe asks.

“I was, and I’m still having a hard time believing Antilles exists.”

Something goes _ping_ behind Rey and Poe runs his hand through his hair. “Oh, finally. One more thing for you to upgrade on this old pile. Even the machine in my kitchen runs better than this.”

“Please don’t insult the _Falcon_ ,” Rey says, but she smiles when she says it, and she reaches eagerly for the cup that he pours for her. It’s the blue cup, the gift that Leia had given her, and she savors that first deep breath of sweetener-laced steam, and takes a long, slow, appreciative sip.

_Spang!_

And then BB-8 is excitedly chittering at them, bobbing and zooming around in little circles.

“I think I got about half of that,” Finn says. “Someone’s coming here?”

“ _Here_ as in this asteroid belt, yeah, you got that,” Poe says. He looks, Rey thinks, frankly skeptical. “And I have no idea as to _why_ they’d do something so foolhardy, we’re all here _precisely_ because we’re hiding, and I had to pressurize my flight suit to get in here with you, and -- how is it that someone’s coming to visit? Rey?”

She knows why he’s asking, she knows the worry that settles like a dark cloud on his shoulders, and she reaches out to the Force and _hopes_.

Sleek rapid elongated hull bearing down on them, she thinks. Elongated and elegant and -- coming in rapidly, is the being at the controls _another_ expert pilot? She thinks the Resistance is collecting beings who can make their ships dance around heavy ponderous happabore-slow First Order galumphing giants -- 

Chewie barks the warning: _Incoming comms._

“Leia’s really going out on a limb with your ships. Kind of really noticeable, aren’t they? Especially that black X-wing. I can’t really think there are a lot of those particular paint jobs in this galaxy.”

She can hear the others in the cockpit, all of them shoulder to shoulder in apprehension. 

The voice is as ragged with age as Leia’s or Luke’s, but the words are glib and rapidfire and self-assured.

“And Corellian freighter, I owned something that looked a whole lot like you once, though I can’t be too sure without taking a peek at the underside, so many modifications you could make to that kind of ship without hurting it too much.”

“Chewie,” Rey says when the Wookiee reaches for the comms. 

_Trust me,_ Chewie growls quietly. And then: _Don’t think I’ve forgiven you for Cloud City._

“ _Chewie_ , you wonderful elusive cuss! I have been looking _all over_ for you -- so it’s really you? And you’ve got the _Falcon_!”

_Identify yourself for the crew, please. They’re not familiar with the likes of you._

“Now that really stings,” the voice says, and the words are mixed in with amused laughter. “Do you mean to tell me that you’re flying this beauty without the others?”

Hands slide into Rey’s. She accepts a kiss to her forehead from Finn, and a comforting nonsense whisper from Poe. 

_Not alone. But Solo -- Solo is gone. He died, at Starkiller._

The comm goes dead silent.

Rey takes the comm. “You know the General?” she asks, quietly and firmly.

“I knew her, yes, and I’ve flown with her,” the voice says, after a long time. “This is -- this is the _Lady Luck_ with Lando Calrissian aboard. I came to -- to see some old friends, and to send them some things that might help them with, ah, morale-boosting. I -- I suppose I’m -- I’m very much behind the times.” Calrissian sounds so old, suddenly, like all the smiles have been punched out of him. “I was hoping to catch up.”

“She said you had something for us, or we had to do something for you -- ”

“Nothing for you to do, I’m afraid, _Falcon_ ,” is the response. “Except take on some cargo. Actually a lot of it. I’m a settled-down man, now, a married man. But Tendra and I, we thought we’d send some friends a few things to tide them over. Mostly creature comforts but don’t tell Leia that, she’ll tell me I’m getting soft in my old age and I am no such thing. Old, I mean. So -- cargo.”

The Force brings her whispers of a carefree smile that hid far too many secrets, that carried too much guilt, that wished for adventures.

“We’ll -- lift off and receive the cargo. And you can come on board.”

“Much obliged,” Calrissian says.

The comms fall silent, and she raises an eyebrow at Poe. “Is that name familiar to you, as well?”

A quick nod. She catches the glance he flicks in Finn’s direction. “Lando Calrissian’s -- well, if the stories are true, he owned this ship before Han Solo did. There was a card game involved.”

 _Sabacc,_ Chewie supplies, looking amused. _Solo won the ship in a high-stakes game of sabacc._

Rey knows she looks as shocked as Finn does: ships for stakes? In a game of _cards_? 

“I really don’t know much about Solo,” Finn mutters after a moment, and she can feel him squirming, unease sitting heavily on his shoulders. 

“Well, there’re too many stories, kind of hard to tell the truth from the -- the stories,” Poe says, hands thrust into his pockets.

“Nothing to do but tell stories on the way back,” Rey says, after a moment. “Let’s deal with this cargo and then -- then we’ll tell stories.”

“I should get _Black One_ prepped to go,” Poe says.

She reaches for his hand, and for Finn’s, and for a moment -- for a moment she is grateful, strangely humbled and grateful, because they are all here and they are all together in this moment, in this stolen shard of time. 

Again she feels that presence over her shoulder, just out of reach, the weight of a leather jacket on weary -- but unbowed -- shoulders.

“Safe flight, Black Leader,” Finn says.

Pensive curls in Poe’s hair as the airlock cycles and he’s temporarily gone, protected from the voids and deeps of space by his flight suit and his helmet.

Beneath her fingertips the switches and levers and controls of the _Falcon_ hum and sputter and flicker into life: and she thinks of other beings sitting in this cockpit, other pilots and co-pilots, and the possibility of _crew_ , hovering just out of sight or just behind her, crowded in around the narrow door, leaning against the mismatched cracked and warped bulkheads.

Beside her, Chewie roars quietly. _This ship has had a long history._

“I can feel it,” she says, as she finishes the pre-flight checks. 

Her stomach growls, the barely-drunk caf churning.

Up close the _Lady Luck_ couldn’t look any less than the _Millennium Falcon_ if either ship tried -- but Chewie’s muttering about _Lando_ and _old habits_ , and she’s already familiar with the hidey-holes on this ship, and she wonders about all this talk of cargo. 

“Engaging airlocks,” she says, and she holds her breath as she waits for the two ships to hit the proper alignment. 

And then there’s a knock on the door.

“Rey,” Finn says, and she knows why he’s looking at her like that, she can read that familiar expression on his face: the expression that says he wants to look after her. Wants to protect her. 

“We’ll protect each other,” she offers.

 _Come on,_ Chewie rumbles, and she hurries to catch up with the Wookiee’s long, deck-eating stride.

On the other side of the airlock is -- just a humanoid-shaped being. Dark skin and iron-gray hair, and a neatly trimmed moustache. A somber smile. Lines in the corners of dark shrewd eyes. “Well met,” the being who must be Lando Calrissian says. “And Chewie. It’s been _years_.”

_You’re old._

“And you clearly haven’t aged a day.”

Rey hangs back, wary, as the Wookiee and the man embrace. 

“I heard about Starkiller and what it did, what it had done -- and I heard about it getting destroyed. I should’ve known you’d be right in the thick of it,” Calrissian says. “You and Han both. How -- how did he -- ”

She steps forward, then. “Kylo Ren killed him.”

“Kylo Ren -- _Ben_ \-- ” Calrissian stumbles back.

“I don’t think he’ll answer to that name any more,” Finn says.

Rey’s hand tightens on the hilt of the lightsaber still clipped to her belt. The smell of snow and the stark near-black of frozen blood, ragged puddles on cracking ground.

“You’re right.” Somehow Calrissian makes his way to the cabin, and he falls into the nearest chair, which rocks and groans quietly under his unexpected weight. “I remember the little boy. I suppose he’s gone, now, gone to whoever’s corrupted him.”

“Snoke,” she hears Finn hiss.

“And so Leia continues to fight her war. I hope that the things I’ve brought you, brought her, will be -- will be useful.”

“What are these things exactly?” Rey asks.

“Deeds to a ship or two. You’ll want more than just this fine old beauty of yours, and before you protest, yes, I know, that’s an _insult_. But the _Falcon_ is not only the best ship in the galaxy -- it’s also kind of notorious. Kind of well-known.”

Chewie groans in agreement.

“So you’ll want one or two good-enough ones to use when you can’t use this.” Calrissian waves his hand in the direction of the airlock. “Other things. Half a shipment of pistols that Tendra, ahem, liberated from somewhere else. Several dozen pairs of macrobinoculars. Body armor, bits and pieces, that I was able to sneak out from under the First Order’s nose. There’re some comms equipment, things Leia can put in her command center -- don’t worry, I scrubbed them as best as I could, and she’s also welcome to take them apart and put them back together -- ”

Rey’s hand itches, suddenly, and she rubs it against her other sleeve, and she’s not sure Finn doesn’t raise an eyebrow at her.

“One more thing,” Calrissian says, after a moment. “Can one of you get the smallest box -- the one with the blue seams.”

“This one?” Finn asks. “It’s kind of light for -- you know, important secret things that are going to help the Resistance.” It’s not a small box, not really, it’s just small compared to the rest of the huge crates now stacked all around the airlock, heaved in by the small crew of the _Lady Luck_ , who are wearing mismatched blacks and blues. 

“That’s because it’s filled with important things that are _not_ secret.” When the crate is at his feet Calrissian pries it open, and -- 

“Tea,” Rey says, and she can’t help but step forward. “There wasn’t any tea in the last place we stopped.”

“And that, I’m sure, is a pity,” Calrissian says. “But. Indulge an older man. You have that look of a desert about you -- I’ve been to Tatooine, I’ve seen the tired weathered looks on the faces of the beings hanging around Mos Eisley. But you’re not from there, are you? Not if you’re carrying a lightsaber. Who are you? Is Leia now training Jedi?”

“Her brother is,” Rey says as she draws herself up to her full height. “I’m Rey. I -- I was from Jakku, but now I’m training to become a Jedi Knight. Luke Skywalker is my Master.”

She’s not expecting tears to actually shine in the corners of Calrissian’s eyes. “After everything he’s been through -- after all that he’s training a student again. He must think quite highly of you.”

She catches a glimpse of Finn’s approving grin out of the corner of her eye. 

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Rey,” Calrissian says. “And your friend?”

Finn steps forward. “I’m Finn. I used to be with the First Order.”

“I’ve never heard anyone say those words before. _I used to be with the First Order._ Were you perhaps an irregular of some sort? An agent of theirs?”

“I was a stormtrooper.”

There is a long silence, and then Calrissian says: “I could almost believe that, that the Force was working in this galaxy once more. A former stormtrooper. And Leia and Luke know of you?”

Finn nods, once.

“Then, truly, more power to you. To both of you, and to Chewie, and to your X-wing escort. I’m glad that Leia has you to work with. And -- I suppose, then, that this is for you.”

Calrissian places a box with a clear cover on top of the dejarik table. Inside is something brown and shiny, decorated sparingly in curlicues and curves of white. 

Chewie laughs. _You sap._

“Not my fault I’m one of the few to remember that Han never had a sweet tooth -- except when one of these things was on the table, and then he’d _draw_ his blaster on anyone who took a piece before he could.” 

“This is something you eat?” Finn asks.

“It’s cake, chocolate cake,” Calrissian says with a wide grin. “I actually brought two -- my wife insisted -- you should try to make sure the other cake makes it to Leia and Luke but this one is all yours. Think of it as a, a welcome-to-the-ship present, from one of the beings who used to fly it. I envy you all those hours of maneuvering and having too much fun in the middle of the fight, but I don’t envy you all those equally punishing hours of fixing her up, so -- here’s something to sweeten the hours. Literally, I suppose.”

“Thank you,” Rey says. “Do you need escort back to your home system?”

“I’d rather you didn’t fly this ship to places it doesn’t need to be, not yet,” Calrissian says. “Plausible deniability, and all that. Like I said, this ship is notorious, and she deserves to be, but let’s think about protecting you and the Resistance as well. Besides. The _Lady Luck_ ’s not entirely a stranger to the battlefield. We’ll -- we’ll manage. It’s Tendra in the gunner’s station after all.”

“And if we should have need to contact you?”

Calrissian nods to the opened crate. “Isolated readers in there, the three or four of them I could take apart and check before putting them back together. The information on me and the _Lady Luck_ will be on one of them, plus some encryption routines that Leia’ll know how to use. One way or another, she’ll be able to use those readers to reach me.”

Rey surprises herself, then, by holding a hand out to him. “Thank you. For all of this, for the cake, and for -- for the _Falcon_. Our pilot, our companion, he told us you used to own this.”

“She’s a fine ship and I look forward to hearing about her getting in fights again. You take care of her -- and Chewie, you take care of yourself.”

“Can we go home now?” Poe asks, over the comms, once the _Lady Luck_ ’s vanished into hyperspace.

“I have a question, first,” Rey says as she keys coordinates into the nav computer. “What in all the galaxy is a chocolate cake?”

Sudden choking noises.

“Poe,” Finn says. “You all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m just -- he came all the way out here to deliver _chocolate cake_?”

“I don’t understand why you’re making a big deal out of it.”

“You say that now, let’s see what happens after you’ve tried it.”

“Easy enough, I’ll go and get a piece now -- ”

“ _Don’t you dare, Finn!_ You’re not eating that without me!”

Rey raises an eyebrow at the bickering, and looks over her shoulder in the direction of the cabin, and wonders, quietly, about Han Solo, and about Leia Organa, and about Luke Skywalker, and about all the other parts of the story, the _stories_ , that she hasn’t yet heard.

eleven: rations

She runs, and the stitch in her side is an old and weary and familiar pain, and she scrabbles across slippery rocks and the treacherous tide-worn surf and she _runs_.

Overhead: screaming engines, contrails looping and twisting around each other, and the whine and crash of turbolaser fire.

The salt-spray breeze lashes bright pain against her wounds. A blaster shot grazing her shoulder, and a long lightning-slash of a burn up her right leg. 

She’s alone, and she can barely feel the presence of Master Luke in the Force, let alone Poe or Finn or the others. Jessika and Iella and Adra. Wedge and Temmin. BB-8.

Footsteps, crashing behind her.

She closes her eyes, trusts in the Force, aims her blaster over her shoulder. Three breaths equals a volley of three shots. 

Again the soughing cry of the wind, but now she can risk a glance over her shoulder. The white armor, unmoving, is nearly invisible against the pale sand and the foaming crashing in-and-out of the waves.

Safe place, safe place, she needs to find a place where she can lick her wounds for just a moment, where she can be safe.

The sands beneath her feet shifts and groans with the motion of the waves, and it is nothing like the sands she’d grown up on.

Twisting passageways in dark smooth rock: she threads a winding path that leads Force only knows where. 

One breath after another, salt-heavy, sand-bitter: and the rocks jutting out from the sides of the canyon walls slash at her sleeves, slash at her arms, and the wounds are a small consolation: if these rocks can hurt her, then they can hurt anything and anyone that comes after her.

Maybe.

The passage narrows and narrows and -- there, there’s the dead end, of course there would be a dead end. Now she has to find the way _around_ the dead end. 

Here is a turning in the rocks, an opening that not even BB-8 might be able to pass through, and -- Rey takes a deep breath and smells _green_. 

Light-rod clipped to her belt, next to the holster for her blaster. She cracks the lightweight plastic against the sharp rocks sticking out just overhead. Pallid yellow light, nowhere near enough to push away all of the shadows, leaving the walls shrouded in uncertain black.

Water running over her boots, a thin steady stream, and in the stream -- she bends down, fascinated despite herself. The flat leaf-like structures are no bigger than the palm of her hand, with five lobes and vein-like lines, and when she plucks one off and smells it the thick scent of salt and, strangely, smothered ash, wafts up to her nose. The leaf leaves a mucilaginous coating behind on her hand, that doesn’t completely go away even after she nearly scrapes her palm raw against the rocks.

“Ugh.” And her voice, her voice is so _small_ in this place, overwhelmed by the continuing hue and cry of the sea, its echoes rebounding and rebounding all around her. 

Deeper into the chamber: and she finally finds a relatively dry spot. A large flat outcropping of rocks -- it’s child’s play to scramble onto the top.

Crystals, growing in the cracks of the outcropping, fistfuls and fist-sized. 

Could she take some of those crystals with her?

But -- danger. Salt-water stinging her wounds. The familiar gnash of hunger, growling low and deep in her belly.

She lays her weapons out at her side. A blaster. A lightsaber. Her wits and her determination and her pride, and the wish to return to Dosuun, to go home with and to her friends.

And in the pack that she’s still somehow carrying despite falling and tripping and grappling -- she’s still got something to eat. Something to drink. A pouch full of water and a quarter-pack of Resistance rations. As green as the meals she used to eat back on Jakku, but Jessika’d taken pains to explain the quarter-pack’s contents. 

Old habits, Rey thinks, for even when she’d made that battered AT-AT her home she’d never really felt _safe_ in the blasted thing. 

She watches the corners of the cave, watches the salty stream below her feet, watches the one means of passage in and out.

Her hands, her hands never stop moving: she tears the water pouch open, then the ration pack. The instructions say to pour the first pouch into the second. No stirring required, just a vigorous shake or two.

What is she expecting? Rock-hard bread? Shreds of reconstituted meat? Certainly not this: she reopens the ration pack to a puff of fragrant steam, and green sauce studded with cubes of root vegetable, and -- she squeezes the pack and the contents shift, revealing the final layer. She’s actually familiar with these round little balls; Finn had taken it into his head to learn how to cook and started with this product made from meal that had been ground from a dark-brown grain. Mixed into simple gravy or tossed by the handful into a hearty soup, or -- once -- mixed with blue-tinted cream and a few spoons of sweetener, it made a comforting meal.

She nods, once, thinking about Finn’s hands stained with crumbs and grease, thinking about Jessika muttering vehemently about _actual food_.

One eye on the passageway, the other on her weapons: she eats with her hand, sucks the sauce off her fingertips, and all the while the water whispers past her, and all the while the Force settles around her.

Overhead: a long anguished engine-cry that abruptly terminates in an impact that shakes the walls of the chamber.

The cracks in the rock beneath her shiver, and gape more widely, and she seizes her chance. Down the pouch of food, carefully set aside next to her blaster. She wedges the fingers of her clean hand into the nearest set of cracks, fishes around blindly for a loose piece -- she hisses when she cuts her fingertip but she hangs on, draws her hand out and the large handful of crystal she’d seized, and again there’s blood on her skin, running freely and stung by the salt in the air.

But she’s got a perfectly formed crystal in her hand: a rough ovoid shape, translucent milky-white, round at one end and pointed at the other. A fine sheen on the surface, and glittering inclusions of tiny sharp cuboids seeming to float within the interior. Larger than her cupped hand, and surprisingly heavy, too. 

Oh, she’s bleeding onto the crystal.

But with every moment that she holds on to the crystal she can _hear_ the Force more and more clearly, as though the song it had been singing of distant springs and salvageable parts has been growing stronger and clearer and more powerful.

“Something important,” she mutters, and again her words are picked up by her rocky surroundings and thrown around, repeating, so that suddenly the cave is full of her own quiet voice.

Quickly she cleans the crystal and wraps it up in a bit of cloth torn from her sleeve; just as quickly she finishes off her makeshift meal and gathers her things back together.

Movement in the Force, coming towards her, urgent and alive and -- oh, _engines_ , she can hear engines, are those the others? She reaches out to them, and somehow it’s easier this time. She can _feel_ Poe at the controls and Finn beside him. They’re alive, they’re alive, they’ve survived -- 

And still instinct quells her just as she’s about to burst out of the mouth of the narrow passage, just as she’s about to emerge into the salt-spray wind once again, and there is movement in the nearby rocks that does not feel like any of her friends, that doesn’t feel like any of the people she’d been flying with, and there’s a glint of muzzle and she lets the unconscious thought flow pell-mell into her, lets it propel her movements and she draws her blaster, fires and fires and fires. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpses the incoming flash of turbolaser fire and she ducks, but it doesn’t hit anywhere near her -- it hits the same spot she had been shooting at and in the ensuing explosion she can now see the scatter of body armor, merciless white.

Whine and roar of repulsorlifts, and she turns to the blocky freighter hovering over the wild water -- one of the ships sent on to the Resistance from Lando Calrissian -- and BB-8’s long whooping welcome is easy to hear even with the crash of the waves. 

“Quick, come _on_ , before anyone else finds us!” Poe’s voice, magnified and distorted and commanding.

And she throws herself headlong into the relentless surf, clutching her pack with every movement, and she’s grateful for Finn’s hand swinging down to her from one side of the hatch, pulling her up and away into the ship, and she’s talking even before she can regain her breath: “Where is everyone? Is Master Luke all right? Are the two of you -- ”

“Rey,” and there’s a hand on her arm. She knows this hand. Familiar dark skin and familiar blaster-calluses. She reaches for that hand and enfolds it in both of her own.

“Finn,” she says as she sags against him in relief.

“Skywalker told us where to find you, he’s in orbit with the other ship. Most of us are all right but we’ve got to hurry back to the base, Adra’s in critical condition -- ”

“Master Luke should be helping her -- ”

“That’s exactly what he’s doing -- ”

She puts her arms around Finn, and shivers.

“Breaking atmo in a few seconds, better brace for turbulence,” Poe calls from the pilot’s seat. 

“We’ll be fine, Rey,” Finn murmurs. Steady as rocks, steady as the constant rhythm of the waves. “Do you want to get into the bunks?”

“’M fine. Co-pilot,” she mutters, after a moment, and she leans on him, and then on Poe, and the sky falls away into the darker deeps of intersystem space, and more and more stars fade into clearer view. 

“You all right?” Poe asks, though he keeps his eyes front and his hands steady. 

“Worried,” she says. “Did you get what we came for?”

A bright flash, a fleeting grin. “And a little extra besides. At the very least, I’m pretty sure the General could use a freshly updated map of First Order territory. Which is apparently starting to shrink, a little, around the edges. We’ll take every bit of space we can wrest back from their grubby hands.”

“And Adra -- ”

A wolfish grin, wild with hope and pleading. “She got us there,” Poe says. “If it hadn’t been for her -- ”

“We have to believe she’ll make it,” Finn murmurs, and Rey looks up at him from where she’s huddled in the co-pilot’s chair. “She’ll make it. Skywalker’ll help. We just have to believe.”

“Yeah,” Poe says, very quietly.

At Rey’s feet, BB-8 rolls up and lets out a mournful little _whoopwhoop_ sound.

The stars dash out into long lingering lines.

twelve: overnight eggs

On Jakku, you worked through every malady and every injury and every wound, or you went without: without food and without water and without medicines, what little there were that came in isolated batches, never enough for every being who might need it.

Rey knows she’s lucky. Knows that she’s survived nasty falls, that she’s made it through terrible fevers, and once a day-long aching listless lethargy that left her unable to rise from her hammock, cold and gnawingly hungry in the middle of the searing desert morning. 

So little in the way of medical care on a desert planet populated by little more than a piddling handful of struggling scavengers, and every single one of them at the mercy of grasping credit-pinching bastards like Unkar Plutt.

She shifts, now, on the hard chair in the corner of the Resistance’s medical quarters, and she’s sick and tired of this place after spending those long days at the beginning of Finn’s convalescence -- but she’s here, and she’s watching over a friend, and she’s lost count of the hours.

Here is the bed. It is barely long enough to hold the body of a humanoid being. This bed has been occupied for two days and two nights, since a mad dash back from a recon mission. Quiet breathing, almost _too_ quiet -- but steady, steady, and that steadiness is a desperately welcome sign of life.

Adra is pale, far too pale, against the harsh white of the sheets. As white as the bandages covering most of her left cheek. Bacta, they ran through the allocation of bacta before Doctor Kalonia could deal with that deep cauterized slash from a lightdagger. Rey is more familiar with the application of carefully placed, carefully knotted surgical sutures, and now she traces the black stitches running along Adra’s jaw with her eyes.

Adra’s feet stick out from the end of the bed, necessitating a makeshift extension by means of a chair. 

A stand leaning against the wall next to Adra in her bed. Dark-red blood in a translucent pouch on a hook, and a thin length of clear tubing connecting Adra to that pouch.

Blood, trickling down. It’s the third pouch. Rey’s been counting. Blood to replace what Adra had lost, bleeding as they screamed through hyperspace and bridged the parsecs between a remote First Order base and the Resistance on Dosuun.

How many pouches will it take before Adra can wake up?

Something chitters very softly next to Rey’s knees, and her thoughts unravel and straggle away gloomily as she looks down at BB-8. 

“It’s just me,” Rey whispers, patting the droid’s domed head. “Everyone else went to sleep.”

“Kind of you to stay.” Broad shoulders. Reddish hair cropped short. Even when she sits down on the floor Plourr Estillo still seems to dominate the room. The way she carries herself, the way she curls her hands into fists and sets them onto her knees, the way she draws and meets every gaze -- it makes Rey think of the General, and not for the first time she wonders who Plourr is when she’s on her home planet. She’s certainly strong-willed and that word comes up, too, whenever anyone talks about Leia as a Princess of Alderaan.

“Adra made her choices,” Plourr adds, after a moment.

Rey nods. Master Skywalker had told her the entire story, just the two of them next to the tray full of empty cups of caf. The rest of the team huddled in a disconsolate circle in the other corner of the mess hall. Adra, battered nearly down to her knees after a confrontation with several Gamorreans, and still leading the way into the inner rooms of the First Order base. Limping and bashed up and still fighting. 

“I know,” she tells herself, and tells Plourr. “That’s why I’m here. She -- she deserves company, she deserves her friends near her.”

Soft grunt. Acquiescence. 

“I don’t know her very well, either,” Plourr offers, eventually. 

“She -- she keeps to herself,” Rey murmurs. “I only know about where she comes from, and that braid that’s wrapped around her head, because I overheard Joss talking about it. Connix wanted to know.”

“Something to do with the social castes in her culture,” Plourr says, nodding. “I -- I am familiar with the concept. As are you, now, I would suppose.”

Rey shakes her head from side to side and her padawan braid falls out of the lowermost of her hair loops. The little golden bead on the end: a gift from Jessika. “Mine means I’m just starting out.”

“Hers means she has already accomplished great things.”

“Which we know nothing about,” Rey says. “Maybe -- maybe she killed some kind of monster? Maybe it was destroying cities and eating her people?” It’s like murmuring to her doll all over again, trying to pass the interminably slow minutes and hours in the desert-bound nights. Silent unchanging stars wheeling overhead, and frost settling invisibly and briefly in the shadows of the AT-AT.

“Maybe she saved a -- a great leader,” Plourr says. “Risked her life to make sure that her leader would not be cut down by their foolish and ignoble enemies.” 

Rey tries to smile. “And that leader asked Adra to succeed her, and Adra said no, because she would rather be a fighter, a protector. She would rather defend her leader from any enemy, from every enemy.”

“You have a knack for these stories.” 

“I had nothing _but_ stories, and a few other things that I scavenged, on Jakku.” Rey lets herself sigh. “And you?”

Those broad shoulders slump a little. “I -- I am just an ordinary person. There are no stories to tell about me, and I have no stories to tell you.”

Closed off. The Force comes to Rey and whispers to her, and for once she pushes the impressions away.

She puts her hand on Plourr’s arm, instead, just for a moment. “With the Resistance there’ll be stories about you and me and Adra and all of us. You, flying through space, fighting the First Order so fiercely.”

And Plourr laughs. “How can you be so sure of that when you’ve never seen me fly?” 

“I want to -- I miss flying -- but you’re part of Iella’s squad and that tells me something.”

“You are a very strange person,” Plourr says, after a moment, but she’s smiling when she says it.

And Adra continues to sleep, and for a moment Rey thinks of Poe. Was this what it was like for him, all those nights waiting for Finn to wake up?

The thought makes her sigh, and fold herself up into a small ball on the hard chair, forehead on her knees and misery twanging up and down her nerves.

“Rey,” Plourr says.

Before she can answer the other woman is putting something into her hand: a small smooth shape, just a little larger than her palm. She can just barely feel the network of fine cracks and the brittle little pieces that crack and fall away. 

She looks.

Brown shape speckled in large and small patches of dark gray, and she lets the fancy take her, imagines that this roundish shape is a world rotating awkwardly on its axis, with dark areas separated by brown. Which color would stand for the land? Which for the seas? 

She glances over at Plourr, who is scratching at a crack until a ragged piece drops into her hand -- and then Plourr gets to work, _peeling_ the shape, revealing a more uniform brown beneath.

Rey does the same to her own and is left with a smooth-skinned thing that smells, very vaguely, of the leavings of a pot of tea. A chalky smell beneath the lingering ghosts of earthy leaves, not actually unpleasant.

“It’s food,” Plourr says, eventually, and to demonstrate she takes a bite out of the shape in her hand. Chews, quiet and contemplative.

So Rey nibbles at the smoothish brown, and tastes tea but also salt. Gelatinous substance, yielding just a little before she cuts through with her teeth. 

She takes another bite and -- there’s a new texture, creamy and soft. Yellow in the middle of the brown, gently set. 

“What are we eating?” Rey asks around her third bite. 

“You’re aware of animals that lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young,” Plourr says.

“Yes, but normally if you open an egg you’ll find _something_ inside. The insides of these eggs do not look like -- young animals.”

“Because these eggs were never fertilized.”

Rey squints at the remnant of her egg, before wolfing it down. “So we’re eating -- what the young would have eaten, if it had been inside the egg.”

“It’s food, isn’t it? Either it’s food for the young or food for some other being to eat.”

“I only ever saw small eggs,” and she holds up her thumb and first finger to demonstrate. 

“And what came out of these small eggs?”

Rey says, flatly, “Long-nosed strikers. Kill you with one bite. I would hunt the full-grown ones and try to sell the skins. But -- they were so full of poison that it wasn’t always worth the risk. One bite’s all it takes, then you burn up with fever and pain in the joints for two days, and then you die.”

Plourr nods. “So you would break the eggs of these strikers, if you found them?”

“Yes.”

“On my world, the flying animals would lay all kinds of eggs, all sizes, and sometimes if you were lucky enough you’d find an egg the size of your own head, and then you wouldn’t have any problems with dinner for a day or two.”

“Unless you don’t like eggs,” Rey says.

“You don’t like these?”

“It’s not that I don’t like them. But I’ll always think of stomping on them first before I think about putting them in my mouth.”

And Plourr chuckles, quiet rumbling, darkly amused. “I see.”

“Sorry,” Rey mutters, feeling a flush rise toward her hairline.

“I’m not offended. I’m just -- you’re right, everyone has a different reaction to eggs. For those who eat them, they’ll talk about different ways of cooking. For those who don’t, they might talk about why they wouldn’t touch the stuff with a light-pike.”

She glances at the woman in the bed. “And do you know if Adra eats eggs?” 

“I know she does.” Plourr peels another egg, takes a bite, chews, swallows. “She cracks them open and pours the contents onto a flat pan filled with a little oil, heated over a fire. I don’t care much for that method of cooking, but the others -- Elscol and Koyi and also, I heard, Ilana, like them that way.” 

“And how do you make _these_?” Rey takes another egg from the container next to Plourr’s feet, turns it over and over in her hands, but she doesn’t attempt to peel or eat it.

A shrug. “Take ten eggs, put them in a small pot of water, sprinkle in a handful of salt and the spent leaves from someone’s cup of tea. Put the pot over a source of heat for the exact amount of time that it takes the water to boil -- and as soon as it boils, take the pot off the heat, cover with a thin cloth and then put on the lid. Weight the lid down with a helmet if you have one. Wait eight hours.”

Rey raises an eyebrow. “Eight hours?”

“That’s what I was taught.” An elegant motion as Plourr rises to her feet and throws the leavings of the eggs into the nearest waste container. “I would boil the eggs in their pot just before going to bed, and then wake up and take an egg from the pot. The water wouldn’t be hot any more, so I’d never scald myself -- and I’d have breakfast ready.”

“I wonder if that might have been possible with long-nosed striker eggs.” But Rey scrunches up her nose and shakes her head in disgust. “Maybe I shouldn’t think about it.”

“You shouldn’t.” Plourr is now standing next to Adra’s bed. The skin of her arms is seamed and criss-crossed with the silvery lines of scars. “Wake up,” she says, gently, to the unconscious patient.

“You made these eggs for her,” Rey murmurs as she stands. Sharp bright momentary flare of pain in her knees. 

“I made them for anyone who was going to watch with her.”

Footsteps, then, and Rey turns toward the door, and there are Ienne and Anorra, and they look so very different from each other: Ienne’s skin is even darker and richer in color than Finn’s, and Anorra is so pale the veins beneath her skin are easily visible, thick lines and thin alike. 

“We’ll take over from here,” Anorra murmurs.

“I made eggs,” Plourr offers. “You can have some.”

“Thank you,” Ienne says. 

“If anything happens,” Rey begins.

“We will let you know, and that is a promise.”

thirteen: pleated pockets

Breathe in, hold, count to six, then breathe out.

Breathe in. Feel the rush of blood just beneath the skin, smell the morning damp dripping off the grass and the leaves, listen to the skittering insects and small animals and the birds calling overhead. Breathe out.

Breathe in. The Force flows through the rock and ripples on the water; it clings to the vine and shivers on the wind; it beats in time with her heart. Breathe out.

Breathe in. Adra is awake, and healing, but she will be grounded for seven weeks. Poe and Finn are leading the next set of recon missions. Iella is considering whether to tell Wedge that she is pregnant. Testor is reading technical manuals. Breathe out.

Breathe in. 

Whirring, rapid mechanical movement, and a rising crescendo of alarm.

Scuffle and thump and -- 

Rey opens her eyes just in time to put her foot right on the path, and BB-8 careens right into her leg, agitated and all but wriggling with it. 

“Why are you carrying my pack?”

Concerned / cautious bleep.

“It’s what,” Rey asks, and she reaches into the satchel. Familiar shapes, the few things she’d been carrying around with her when she’d left Jakku, and newer items. A power pack for her blaster, a fresh set of rations, two water pouches, a broken commlink and her little toolkit, and -- 

Smooth hard rounded shape, and when she had been in the cave on that other mission the crystals and the rock and the water had all been cold.

She pulls the object out of her pack.

This is the crystal that she’d retrieved from a crack in the rocks. 

It is warm, as warm as her own blood running through her veins, and it is also glowing -- faintly, but it’s there, it’s unmistakable, because she is casting shadows next to her perch, because she can see BB-8’s rotund shadow stretching across the grass, and she has no idea what is going on.

The droid trills warningly at her, and she nods, and says, “You’re right, I should go and find him; do you know where he is?”

Affirmative chirp.

“Lead the way, then,” and BB-8 chimes out an encouraging tune and starts hurrying back to the base, and it’s child’s play for her to keep loping along, but then they’re passing the landing bays and the mess hall and she warns, “BB-8, this is not the wing where his quarters are.”

“Miss Rey,” says a golden-gleaming droid who is standing at stiff propriety at one of the command center consoles. 

She throws her response over her shoulder -- “Sorry, Threepio, BB-8 is in a rush” -- and she doesn’t hear the reply, only drops the crystal back into her pack -- and then she’s skidding to a surprised halt just in time to avoid running into a very tall Wookiee.

Chewie groans at her. _Haven’t seen you in a while. Hope he’s not making you work too hard._

She dashes the hair out of her eyes. “I’m working hard because I want to, because I have to.”

Huge paw clasped to her shoulder, and then the door ahead opens and she can hear voices filtering out into the corridor: “Oh, not you too. You do realize he was playing a trick on you, yes? I thought you already knew that he was just making you dance around on a string -- Rey,” and that’s Leia with her arms crossed, standing next to a long low couch.

Chewie coughs, and Rey smells the sharp scent of burning in the air, looks around for the source, wishes she had a pile of sand to throw onto the flames -- 

“Calm down,” says the man in the kitchen, holding a smoking pan.

She blinks.

And says, “Is rootleaf stew the _only_ thing you can cook?”

“Force, _thank you_ for saying it so that I don’t have to,” Leia says. And: “Rey, perhaps you could help me clean up the kitchen so that I could make breakfast. Have you eaten?”

Chewie rumbles, conversationally. _I would not say no to bantha sausage if you still have any._

“Let me see,” is the reply, and Rey watches Leia lead Chewie into the next room, presumably in search of supplies.

And her stomach rumbles, but first: she turns, helplessly, to her Master. “Yes, you can pick that scorched and steaming pan up with your bare hand, that’s brilliant, but -- ”

He sighs and turns toward the sink. “I will meditate on my failure,” he says. 

She snorts.

“And yes, I suppose that there isn’t much else I can cook.”

“Yes.”

“But what has brought you here in the first place, Rey? You seem agitated.”

At their feet, BB-8 snorts and shivers in a tight fretful circle.

She reaches for the unyielding smooth lump of her crystal and -- 

“I found this on the last mission we both joined,” Rey says, carefully holding on. Faint light in her hands, growing brighter in tiny tiny increments, but she’s more concerned with the growing warmth of it: warmth that makes her think of cups of tea, of caf. “I took shelter in a cave, and the rocks in that cave were filled with crystals like this.” 

BB-8 bleeps, helpfully: the string of numbers that is that planet’s primary designation.

“But when I brought it back it was cold. It was heavy. It was -- not glowing.”

Her Master’s eyes are intently fixed on her, and on what she’s carrying. “How did you manage to take a piece away with you?”

“The explosions, the fighting -- it caused the walls of the cave to shake. Caused vibrations in the rocks beneath my feet. I wanted to take a loose crystal, if I could find one.”

“And so you found one.” He looks thoughtful. “Tell me, what do you _feel_ when you hold on to that crystal? What can you feel now?”

She closes her eyes.

Reaches out.

And the first thing she catches is -- the careful controlled whisper of small, precise, repeating movements. A thin skin of dough, nearly transparent, wrapped around a small mound of seasoned meat and pleated and pinched prettily into place. A flat tray dusted with fine white, and rows upon rows of the folded pieces.

But neither Leia nor Chewie are doing the folding -- they are instead having a discussion about the _Millennium Falcon_ ’s hyperdrive motivators -- Leia is holding a container filled with the freeze-dried, dough-wrapped meat.

A familiar presence tugs on her, anchors her back in her body. 

And the hand on her shoulder is a familiar metal weight. “Rey. Come back. It’s all right. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

She blinks, and gropes blindly behind her, and falls into the nearest chair, and BB-8 is a comforting presence at her side. 

In her hands the crystal is now softly pulsing to the rhythm of her own breaths. 

“Take a deep breath,” her Master instructs. “What you are feeling is -- history, the deeper stories behind the things that we can see with the ordinary senses.” 

“The deeper stories behind -- whatever it is that Leia keeps to eat?”

A rueful smile. “That might be -- you being naturally and keenly interested in things like food and water. Things that you didn’t have much of, in your years on Jakku.”

She ignores the faint gnawing just beneath her ribcage and nods. “And I felt that story because the folded things were there, and because of this crystal?”

“Folded things. Do you mean these pleated pockets?” Leia asks as she comes back through the door. “I hadn’t even known I still had some -- Luke, aren’t these your favorites? -- but I felt an insistent _push_ , and I went and looked in one of the other boxes we’d been sent for supplies and then, here they were.”

“We’ll set an extra place at the table for my student,” he says.

Rey blinks. “I -- I didn’t come here to interrupt breakfast. I can always eat in the mess hall. I just wanted to ask questions about this crystal. I can come back at another time.”

“You will certainly be working on that crystal in the future,” her Master says. “What you are holding is a variant on a kyber crystal -- the kind that is used to power the blade of a lightsaber. They’re normally found in places like Ilum, but there have always been whispers, rumors, of scattered other places where they exist.” A nod, approving. “It looks like you’ve found one of those other places.”

“It’s been a long time since anyone’s discovered a new source of kyber crystals,” Leia says. “If we had enough manpower I’d set a garrison on that planet -- ”

“That would call too much attention to the crystals.”

“They’re not the only thing we’ve found there. No matter. At least someone can annotate the sector maps for us -- we can go back if we have to, if _you_ need it -- Rey, I would advise that you hold on to that for now, and keep it until you’re ready to craft your own weapon.”

“All in good time,” her Master says.

A fond push, sister to brother, and now Leia is standing over a pot filled with water -- the water comes slowly to a rolling boil, and she dumps the pleated pockets into the boiling water. “Go make yourself useful,” Leia says in Luke’s direction. “Set the table, pour the tea, you know what to do.” 

And: “Come, Rey, sit here. I’ve found something new for us to try -- it’s a kind of tea that’s flavored with the oil that comes out of a fragrant flower they grow on one of those hothouse planets in the Inner Rim -- ”

“What is a hothouse?”

She can ask questions like this; she’s allowed -- encouraged -- to ask questions.

Chewie manages to sit perfectly comfortably in one of the humanoid-sized chairs to her right, and her Master eats his share of the pleated pockets without using any utensils at all, and the scent of the flowers in her tea is so powerful that it lingers in her hair for the rest of the day, and halfway through breakfast R2-D2 rolls in and that sends BB-8 into an electronic tizzy, and the careworn lines in Leia’s face ease, just a little, just enough to be noticeable. 

fourteen: sweet ice

Rey watches Finn’s hands move over sticks and control panels, and nods encouragement.

The tiny freighter judders from side to side as it takes off, and it shimmies alarmingly on the required course correction -- but they’re in the air and Finn is still sweating buckets and she wordlessly offers him the hazy, luminous thought: _Keep going._

“Got you on the scans, hold your course for exactly ten minutes and then we’re going into the upper atmosphere, all right?” Poe says on the comms, and that is followed by a buzz of a fanfare from BB-8 loaded up into its usual position aboard _Black One_ , and the shape of the X-wing is a heroic dash in the skies of Dosuun.

It only takes a glance for her to know that the freighter’s running green, that the engines are humming along beautifully, that they’re on course -- but then, she’s not piloting the freighter.

She grasps Finn’s shoulder instead, and says, “You’re doing well.”

“But why did he say that we need to hold our course? Where are we going?” 

“I don’t know,” she says, still in that same gentle firm tone. She breathes carefully, controlled, in and out, and slowly she can hear Finn’s breaths shift to follow hers. She nods. “But this is for you. So you can become familiar with flying. We’ll trust him. He’s never led us wrong.”

It’s a welcome surprise when that gets her a laugh. “Except maybe for that one time he got lost. On his own base. And he was following directions on a data pad.”

“I heard that,” Poe says, “you guys just want to kick a man when he’s down, don’t you? And also that happened a couple of weeks ago, we promised never to speak of it again.”

“I wasn’t there,” Rey says, “so I never made that promise.”

“Please let’s never speak of it again,” Poe says.

“Maybe,” Rey says, and she sends him a sort of _impression_ in the only way she knows, the idea of looking at herself in the mirror and wearing a sardonic smile -- and the response is a delighted chuckle.

“That was good, Rey, I think that was really clear.”

“I’m still working on communicating actual _words_ through the Force.”

“It doesn’t have to be the _only_ way of communicating, does it? Images are just as powerful, if you build them the right way.”

“I’ll meditate on it,” Rey says. 

“Ten minutes in five,” Finn says, eventually. “Four, three, two, one. Upper atmo?”

“Ten minutes, mark,” Poe agrees. “Rey, you maybe want to strap in for this one. Finn? Here’s what you need to do: pull up the nose of the freighter -- sixty degrees, maybe a little less -- accelerate to top speed and keep going till you can see stars.”

In the co-pilot’s chair, Rey checks the life-support and pressurization controls. “Ready when you are,” she says, mostly to Finn. And: “I’m here, I’ve got you, don’t panic, just do as Poe says.”

“Yeah,” Finn says, and she listens to him take three shuddering breaths before his hands close, muscles jumping, on the control sticks -- the view shifts up past lazily sailing clouds and then the engines are roaring -- she laughs to feel their vibrations shivering up and down her bones -- and she can hear Finn chant, “I can do this I can do this!”

“Kick it,” Poe calls, and she feels it when Finn does just that -- shooting suddenly forward and upward, sky falling away, a great invisible hand pressing her into her seat and then -- stars.

Behind them, she knows, is the yellow dwarf of a star that supports life on Dosuun.

“Go to low power mode, let’s take a moment,” Poe says over the comms. “How you feeling, Finn?”

And Rey watches Finn as he breathes, and stares at his hands and out at space. “I’m starting to see the appeal of flying,” he says, eventually. “I mean, why you and Rey and the other pilots do it: it’s being able to get out here in the first place, right? Out here and beyond? You do it with your own actions, with a good engine, with a proper ship.”

BB-8 bleeps.

“And a good droid, of course, can’t forget that,” Finn says. “It’s knowing that it was by your hands that you got out here.”

“That’s part of it,” Poe says. “I also happen to love starfighters to bits.”

“As long as you don’t mean that literally,” Rey murmurs.

“We could just hang out here for a while, take a good look at the stars,” Finn says, wistfully.

“I promise we’ll go up flying again,” Poe says, “right now, there’s something else we need to do.”

“Yes, this excursion of yours, what is that all about?”

“It’s the reason why I loaded some cold-weather gear onto your freighter. Set course for Dosuun’s north pole.”

Her hands are already moving to check the nav computer -- but she’s looking at Finn and he looks just as puzzled as she feels, so she glances back at the nearest set of readouts and says, “Course plotted in, what do we need to do exactly?”

“Just follow me in, nice and slow, we’re not hurrying anywhere,” is the easy reply.

“Jackets,” Finn says as he throws switches and pushes on the sticks again. “I’m good with one, you can give me just one, you can take all the jackets you want.”

“Let’s see what we have,” Rey says, instead, and there are really only a couple of boxes loaded onto the freighter, so there’s not a lot of work to do: but the first box she opens contains a large bowl and a handful of sealed pouches. No labels that she can see, just the weight of them when she picks them up and shakes them in her hands, and so she moves on to the other box.

Billowing masses of warm material: she gathers them up in her arms and strides back to the cockpit -- and they’re skimming over towering cliffs in a dark sea. Solemn silent great masses of ice, floating serenely on deep-colored waves. 

Poe’s voice over the comms: “...it’ll take us a few more minutes to fly over the north pole of this planet and then we’ll get to the lesson on landing.”

“Poe,” Rey murmurs. Outside, she can make out the lashing foam on the waves. “What are we doing here?”

“I know it looks pretty inhospitable out there, but trust me, this is all going to be worth it. Just -- gear up, and wait for me.”

“I can see the landing beacon,” Finn says. “And also, is it just me or is that wind getting stronger?”

“We’re getting some turbulence,” Rey says as the freighter, shuddering, shoulders a short sharp curve between looming walls of ice-sheet and rock. 

“Are you good to land, Finn?” Poe asks.

“You’re asking me -- what about you?”

“We’re on the ground already, BB-8 did most of the hard work.”

She reaches out to Finn and the renewed sweat on the back of his neck. “You had no problems with getting us up in the air. This is the same thing, you’re just going backwards.”

“My brain’s telling me that I know that, I’m just not too happy about these weather conditions.”

“I don’t have any experience with that either,” she murmurs. “But think about it, we’ll never have any guarantees we’ll be landing next to -- next to someplace nice.”

“Cities aren’t always nice, are they? Or, or Star Destroyers.”

“Definitely not those.” She smoothes her fingertips along his tense shoulder. “Now. Landing. It’s taking off, only backwards. Get us down to a reasonable height -- we can start with that, right?”

“Right, right,” Finn says. 

The landing leaves her breathless and badly jolted and a little bruised -- and it also leaves her with an armful of an equally shaken and equally jubilant Finn. “Little less rough next time,” she says between giggles. “Maybe don’t drop us straight to the ground from fifty feet?”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Finn laughs into the skin of her throat. 

“Are you guys all right?!” Poe asks over the comms. 

“We’re fine,” Rey says, “and Finn says he’ll try to land properly next time.”

“You’d better,” Poe says. “Put your jackets on, all right, I’ll be right with you.”

“We’re not going out to you?”

“Not today. I’m bringing you something.”

“Maybe do it like this,” Finn says, and she looks over at where he’s untangling sleeves and lapels and collars, only for him to drape a pale-leather weight upon her shoulders. “Just wrap it around you some,” he says, “no need to put your arms in if we’re not going out.”

The dark-green jacket he picks out for himself gleams against his fine skin and the running lights in the freighter -- but her moment of admiring him is cut short when there’s a loud knock on the cargo hatch. 

A muffled, familiar voice. “Open up please!”

She rushes to the door and Finn’s hard on her heels, and together they hit the release and the icy slicing winds blow a suddenly white-haired Poe Dameron into the freighter. Snow settling on his eyelashes and clinging to his stubble; snow piled onto his shoulders and caught in the strands of his hair.

And there is snow, too, in the lightweight bag that he is carrying: a fine soft slush.

“Snow in a bag,” Finn says. “We came all the way here so you could put snow in a bag?”

“You were learning how to fly a small freighter. And, this is fresh snow that didn’t fall directly onto the ground, and I’ve run it through a quick analysis to make sure it’s edible,” Poe says.

Rey blinks. “Edible? You can eat snow?” She thinks about it for another moment. “I suppose you can, because it’s made from. From water. It’s edible because it’s made from just water, right?”

“Right in one, it’s just frozen water, perfectly safe to eat. If the water’s safe for drinking in the first place.”

She follows him as he opens the other box from earlier, with the bowl and the pouches. The snow, when it’s poured out into the bowl, forms a glittering heap: flat flakes with seemingly sharp edges, and a soft crackling as the snow begins to melt in the warmth of the freighter’s interior.

“Won’t take a minute,” Poe says, and one after the other he tears open the handful of pouches packed in next to the bowl. 

A heap of tiny purple-red beans, glistening and smoky, staining the snow darkly. Translucent little spheres in black and in white. A tumbled mass of sweet-smelling fruit pulp in rough cubes, as brightly colored as toto-pod flesh. The last pouch, divided into two compartments, spills out a dribble of bright green and then a thick liquid of pale pale cream, and Poe nods and produces utensils from somewhere in the pockets of his extra-insulated flight suit. “Dig in!”

“I -- that looks good, for something that started with _snow_ ,” Finn says, and he sniffs at his loaded utensil before putting it into his mouth. “Mmmm!”

“Rey,” Poe says, encouragingly.

Bright green mixed with dark purple-red, and beans mingled into the flakes of snow, and a stray bit of fruit pulp: and when she puts it into her mouth she nearly falls over at the cool explosion of bright sweetness. The grainy texture of the mushed beans, the tart ripeness of the fruit, and the sweet-leaf flavor of the green syrupy liquid. 

“Good?” Poe asks.

She nods, and eats another mouthful, and the ice that melts onto her tongue sends bolts of bright freezing into her bones, into her nerves, and she shivers and giggles at the same time, and leans so that her forehead is positioned against Poe’s shoulder. “Is this a kind of treat from your home, too?”

“No,” and the warmth of his arm around her shoulders is a startling contrast to the icy sweetness still lingering on her teeth. “Even at the poles Yavin 4 didn’t exactly get cold enough to have -- snow, or places like this. When I signed on with the new Republic I got to travel to different systems, and eventually I got posted to one or two snowbound places. We never really ran out of water -- ”

“I have no idea what that’s like,” she says, laughing a little more.

“...well you do now, or you should, I know Testor’s been talking about parking you in one of those ’freshers with the tub you can sit in....”

“I did that once. I couldn’t make myself get out even after the water had gotten cold.”

“As long as you’re enjoying yourself,” and then suddenly that’s Finn’s weight against her back, and his arms around her waist. “Hey, Poe, we need to make sure that Rey’s enjoying herself.”

“And I want to make sure my boys are happy,” Rey says, and she offers a mouthful of melted-snow beans and fruit and sweet syrup, first to Poe and then to Finn.

Poe’s hand is in her hair, and Finn is nosing along the back of her neck, and the combined warmth of them is even better than sweets and ice.

fifteen: rey cooks

She looks up just in time to see the first stars wink slowly into the deepening blues of the Dosuun night, and just in time for the nightly chorus of insects and small animals: the drone and chitter and chirp of nocturnal life-forms venturing out of their burrows and caves as the day ends.

Long, low building huddling near the ground next to the mess halls: she’s been watching the entrances and exits on this side of the building, and she’s been watching the beings who head into and out of the building. Boxes come in and go out, and droids push larger containers in and then away, and she knows what they store here.

Three beings in protective garments push out of one of the doors with knives and other items in their belts, followed by a humming droid with the shine on its pincerlike hands dulled from exposure to water and cleaning agents, and then -- the building falls quiet.

Silently, she approaches the nearest door. No one around her. One of the mess halls is lit up and full of noise. The rest of the base is eating their evening meals. She’s carrying a piece of bread in her satchel, a leftover from her own early dinner. 

The door whispers open when she pushes on it, and she looks over both shoulders before hurrying into the building. 

Lights flicker on inside -- the switches are motion-activated -- and now Rey is confronted by a half-orderly mess of shelves and containers stacked haphazardly, of bins left open and bins left half-closed, and against the far walls the low cold-storage chests.

Her nose leads her to a nearby handful of crates and she peers in, wonders at the ripe fruity scent, and a little digging leads her to Connix’s favorite berries. She nods, and looks in the next set of containers: tubers, and next to that the aromatic bulbs that seem to feature in many of the savory dishes served in the mess halls.

She’s been spending the last few months eating so many different things, being introduced to so many different foods, sharing so many different experiences with the beings who made up the Resistance, and now there is a welling-up wish in her mind, that has to do with -- giving back. Poe and Finn and Leia and Chewie and Master Luke, and Iella and Wedge and Kalonia and the Admirals, Jessika and Temmin and Nien -- maybe she might not be able to feed the entire base, but -- but she might be able to feed the ones who’ve been kind, who’ve shared their stories as well as their food.

Wandering along the cramped aisles, she spots a can of the beans that Poe grinds into caf next to a canister of the kind of tea that Elscol drinks, and next to them a dust-covered bottle of alcoholic spirits.

Too many interesting things on too many shelves, and she’s still nowhere near an idea: should she make stew? Should she look up a recipe for chocolate cake on the holonets? Or should she just steal Iella’s idea and host a, not a tea party exactly but a party where everyone could drink whatever they wanted, however much of it they wanted?

“I was wondering why you were lurking around the food storage,” says a voice from halfway across the room, and Rey reaches for the staff she isn’t carrying, the blaster that isn’t holstered at her hip, the lightsaber that’s tucked away in her quarters -- and she can’t face her attackers empty-handed, so she grabs the dusty bottle instead.

“Hey, hey, I didn’t mean to frighten you, sorry.” 

It takes a moment to recognize the backlit figure, the hairstyle, and Rey hurriedly puts her bottle down. “Connix. Lieutenant.”

“I’m off-duty, you can call me Kaydel if you like.” Footsteps moving towards her, and the glint of a water pouch. “Do you want a drink or something?”

“Thank you,” Rey says, shaking her head automatically. “I was -- looking around.”

“All right, do you need help with that?”

“I -- um.” Is this the feeling that makes Finn shuffle his feet like he wants to run and can’t move a muscle? Is this the feeling that makes Poe clamp his mouth shut because a torrent of words and no satisfactory story has come out? But she doesn’t even know what she can do. “It’s not really the looking for something that I need help with,” Rey finally says, slowly. “I was looking for ideas.” 

“Ideas?” Kaydel’s approach is marked with a few curious glances into open containers, and an easy movement of reaching into a basket for a long object, yellow skin with dark brown patches. “You’re planning something?”

“Yes, thank you, that was the word I was looking for. I’m planning -- I want to do something for everyone who’s been sharing their food with me. Everyone who’s been telling me stories about the things they like to eat and the things that they don’t like to eat. You,” and now Kaydel’s sitting comfortably nearby on an upturned crate. “You didn’t really seem affected by all the things we drank at Iella’s party. I had to -- I had to sleep an extra hour so I could be steady enough to train with my staff.”

That gets her an amused laugh. “The important word there was _seem_ ,” Kaydel says. “I cheated, a little, because my family’s always had a fairly high tolerance for all the homebrews in the galaxy -- but I also cheated by drinking water between the shots and the bottles and -- pretty much everything else. So I could get up the next day and go back to work in the command center. You had a good time that night, I hope.”

“No one died from the alcohol,” Rey says. “On Jakku if you drank a bad batch you’d never wake up.” She explains moonshine made of thorn-bearing vegetation and evil-smelling leaves, filtered through rusting ship parts, and sometimes pure high-grade poison, depending on how careless the makers had been. 

“That -- that sounds horrible,” Kaydel says, hand over her mouth for the first word. “All the more reason for you to stick around with us. If you want to drink the hard stuff here we’re fairly sure most of it is all right to drink. I mean, sure, alcohol toxicity and all that, but -- here you’ll survive, even if it’s with a bantha of a hangover.”

“And that’s why I want to -- show that I’m grateful. I can eat and I can drink and people even ask me to join them when they eat and drink. There’s water to drink and water to wash with, and -- well, no one talks about being indentured or something.”

“That _is_ kind of the goal of the Resistance. All beings should be free.”

Rey nods in quiet agreement.

“So you want to -- show your appreciation,” Kaydel says. As she speaks she peels the yellow-and-brown skin from the object she’d taken from a basket, revealing a paler yellow fruit that she eats in a handful of bites. “There’s always the cold spread, I suppose, but then I’m not sure we’d have enough food for the entire base in a short amount of time. Maybe. Do you cook?”

“I -- can fry things. I can rehydrate rations. I can make tea. Poe is teaching me how to make some of the things that he eats. Does that answer your question?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of soup: that’s a popular thing around here.”

“What kind of soup?”

“There are sweet soups -- fruits, mostly, I think. Most beings around here, though, they go for soup made with vegetables and meat, served hot enough to scald your tongue if you don’t give it a few minutes to cool. Nien Nunb once gave the mess hall a recipe from his childhood and wow, there were a lot of beings who couldn’t get enough of it. Maybe it was a surprise to some -- Sullust’s a pretty barren planet on the surface -- but, well, you go underground and it’s an entirely different story.”

“Maybe I could ask Nien for the recipe and try to make it myself.”

“Are there no soups on Jakku?”

Rey taps her fingertip against her cheek. “I remember -- I remember one, very faintly. I used to eat it when I was little. There was a woman who taught me how to fight with the staff. Sometimes she’d have enough supplies to make us dinner, not out of the regular rations but out of other things.”

She gets a smile for that. “Tell me about that soup,” Kaydel says, “and I’ll help you make it.”

“It was sour,” Rey begins. “Sour like unripe fruit, like some of those thorned fruit-like things that grew in rare places in the sands, and it was good, it made you shudder and wince but in a good way, because you had to eat it steaming hot and the sourness was combined with the meat and the -- the greens -- ”

Kaydel is nodding, looking excited, and when they pick up the conversation three days later they’re standing in Poe’s kitchen and Rey is going into raptures over the pod-like, brownish-green sour fruit in a basket. “This is -- this is not what we had on Jakku but it smells exactly the same,” she says, taking another deep sniff. 

“I don’t think you want to eat the seeds, though, are they part of the soup?” 

“No,” Rey says. “We’ll have to strain the skins and seeds out later.”

“All right.” 

She picks over the rest of the ingredients -- some fresh bantha meat and a deep purple vegetable nearly as long as her forearm, and small beans encased in lushly green flat pods, and broad dark leaves on slender green-shading-to-purple stems. “Where did you find all of this?”

“I have my methods,” Kaydel says with a mischievous grin. “I do hope I’ve gotten everything.”

“It’s more than enough,” Rey says. Already she’s reaching for the nearest knife, for her memories. A battered pot, its bottom dark with oxidation, its surface a mass of scratches and scrapes. The bright astringent scent that came off the sour fruits when they were washed and then broken into more manageable pieces. The soothing rhythm of snapping the tops and tails off the bean pods. Boiling the meat once, bones and all, to wash the off-flavors away.

She’s stirring the pot in which she’s steeping the sour fruit when there’s a familiar beeping at the door. “Don’t let anyone else come in, BB-8, this is supposed to be a surprise.”

A short series of snorts. 

“They’ll just have to wait.”

She takes her time with brewing the soup, with mixing salty and savory and sour together in the right proportions. Sweat trickles down the back of her neck, and the little kitchen fills with her memory of her staff-teacher’s voice, hoarse and scratchy and piercing all at once. 

There’s grain to eat the soup with, tapered tiny golden-brown grains steamed to a toothsome pleasing bite, and she beams when she’s done, at the two large pots that she strains to lift onto a small hovering cart, which she then steers into the large room next to the suite occupied by Leia.

Kaydel is in the room, pushing chairs and one more table into a free corner, and she grins when Rey comes in. “That smells really, really nice.”

“And now it’s time to eat it,” Rey says, so Kaydel comms the others and the empty room soon fills with familiar faces, the faces of friends. 

“I didn’t know you cooked,” Finn says as he comes into the room, with a grinning Poe hot on his heels -- and Rey laughs when Poe smacks a loud kiss onto her cheek.

“I’ve been flying all day and now I’m famished!”

Bowls at each place at the table, plain scooping utensils, and glasses half-filled with cut-up berries: Rey takes a seat between Finn and Leia and says, “I -- I hope you like what I’ve made,” and she feels her cheeks heat when her Master smiles and gets up and volunteers to dish out the soup and the grain.

“Smells really good,” she hears Temmin say, and next to him Adra and Plourr murmur anticipation and approval, and every face at the table is smiling, from Chewie to Jessika to Nien, and Rey can’t help but hold her breath when Leia picks up her utensil, and takes a long contemplative sip of the steaming soup.

And another, and another -- though she does pause to scrunch up her face in an extended wince that is followed by a delighted little smile. “Sour,” she says, “and it’s _wonderful_ , Rey.”

She can hear Jessika swear approvingly around a mouthful of meat and greens.

She can see Chewie pick up his bowl of soup and drink from it as though it were a cup of tea. 

And Poe and Finn race each other to the bottoms of their bowls, and are the first to get up for second helpings, and then they get conscripted into serving a few of the others, as well.

“Nicely done,” Leia says, when she pushes her empty bowls away. “If you can bear to part with the recipe, if you can share it with the mess halls, I think that it would be appreciated by the rest of the base.”

Rey nods. 

“What else can you cook?” Iella asks as she wipes her mouth daintily.

“This is -- this is all I can remember, for now. I want to learn how to cook other things,” Rey says. 

“I can teach you,” Nien says, as does Plourr.

“I can feel that you poured your thoughts and your hopes into this, and you have succeeded,” her Master murmurs as he pours himself another glass of berry-flavored water. 

“I -- I was meditating, I think, when I was stirring the soup.”

That gets her a quiet, rusty laugh. “Yes. Well. One of the many pleasant side effects of cooking for your own enjoyment.”

 _Easy for you to say,_ Chewie groans.

Leia laughs, as well.

Someone calls in the droids to clear the table and take care of the dishes, and Rey takes advantage of the others’ exit to find a quiet corner of the base, to sit down and stare at her shadowed hands.

Relief and joy are two different things in the Force: one is a long slow exhalation of gently warmed breath, and the other is a fierce prickling heat that seems to rise and fall like waves on an ocean. Together they make her think of the first cool breezes that heralded the Jakku night: a moment to break away from the stifling heat and the endless sands, a moment to look forward to the sun rolling away below the horizon and in its place the lonely stars and the freezing dark. The precipice between day and night, the moment in which it might be possible to dream of running water, a cool trickle down the side of a rock and a welcome relief on scorched skin and parched throat -- 

“Rey.”

She looks up, and she can’t really tell which one of them said her name, but: here are Finn and Poe and they are outlined in the starlight of Dosuun. 

She holds her hands out to them, and she’s expecting them to pull her to her feet, she’s expecting to trail them back to their shared quarters, but her boys sit down next to her instead, hemming her in, surrounding her, wrapping themselves around her. The welcome weight of Poe’s arm around her waist and the sweet careful press of Finn’s mouth to her temple. 

For a moment she can’t speak, can’t find the words to tell them how she feels: so she _shares_ her relief and her joy, instead. Delicate tugs on the Force, on the lines that draw them together, that link them to each other, and she sends them that long slow breath, that rising and falling.

“That soup you made,” Poe murmurs, after a long moment of gratified shared silence. “It made me think of the things my mother and my father used to cook. My grandfather, too, he was incredible in the kitchen, he always seemed to know what to do with the supplies that we could get.”

“You liked the soup,” Rey murmurs, nuzzling briefly along his stubble-rough cheek. 

“Very much. It was -- it tasted like being safe, you know, I know that’s kind of a weird thing to say -- ”

“It made me feel like you were looking after us, like you cared so very deeply,” Finn says, and she feels him wrap both of his hands around hers. “And it wasn’t just me, I think -- I think they all got the message, I think they all felt -- felt what you were trying to say.”

“I thought of you, of both of you, while I was making it,” she murmurs into Finn’s curled hair. “The way you _want_ to work in the mess hall -- I noticed that it wasn’t really a thing for some of the beings here, they didn’t really seem interested in such tasks.”

“I’d rather do KP than anything else,” Finn says. “It’s clean and it’s simple and it’s, yeah, it eats up so much time but it’s calm work. And at the end of that work no one is dead or battered or injured or whatever; at the end of that work people are eating and happy. It beats sanitation.”

“Even if you’re holding the sharpest knives,” Poe teases. “Don’t tell me otherwise, I’ve seen your face when you whet a knife, you actually look like you’re ready to murder something.”

Rey chuckles, and bends out of the way when Finn pretends to punch Poe in the shoulder, and kisses them both. “And you,” she says as she leans against Poe again. “I started thinking about -- cooking, and sharing the food I’d made, with you -- because of you.”

“Me?” He sounds quietly awestruck.

“Yes, you.” She presses her knee closer to his. “Before I thought that they’d let me stay, before I thought that I might have a place in all of this -- you sat with me, you shared your water with me.” She strokes Finn’s arm. “We were watching over you, together, and Poe made sure I had something to eat, something to drink.”

“That’s our Poe: he takes care of us,” Finn says, and his appreciative smile is a beacon in the starlit night. 

She kisses Poe’s cheek again, and laughs softly when she touches his warm skin. “I don’t even need to see you to know that you’re blushing.”

“I can’t help it, you’re saying nice things about me,” Poe mutters, but he, too, is smiling, and he might almost be trying to break away -- but Rey catches him by his hand and his shoulder, and Finn moves so that now Poe’s between the two of them, and that’s fine by her, too. 

“You’ve been pretty good to Finn and me, you know,” Rey says. “You always share your food with us. Though I think you cheated on the chocolate cake.”

Finn snorts out a quiet laugh.

“I’ll never tell,” Poe says, and she wants to kiss the smug grin off his face.

She curls further into his side when the wind picks up, and puts her hands in Finn’s jacket to soak up his warmth.

“We should be getting inside,” Finn says in response. “We can keep you warm, Rey.”

“Maybe you should meet -- my dad,” Poe says, suddenly. “And my grandfather. You said you wanted to learn how to cook other things. Maybe you should meet them, and maybe they can teach you.”

Again that sweet bright spark in her heart. “I don’t want to be any trouble,” she begins.

“No, no, no trouble at all, they’re always asking after my friends, and you -- well you’re more than just my friends, you and Finn, yeah? Dad has this recipe for, for stew that he said he wouldn’t tell me because he would tell my, my partners how to make it for me -- ”

“I’m all ears,” Finn says. “Even if all I can do is chop things. We _definitely_ want to cook for you, Poe. Right, Rey?”

“Yes,” Rey says, and she didn’t have anything to eat because she was too busy watching and waiting and _hoping_ as the others tried the food she’d made -- but now she can smell that savory-sour scent and she feels as warm inside and out.

**Author's Note:**

> If you feel hungry after finishing this fic, then I hope that you have food to make a comforting meal with, and maybe someone to share that comfort with.
> 
> The original seed of this big bang story came from one of my own TFA ficlets, “at table”, which you can find [HERE](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5493311/chapters/13002208). I originally posted that ficlet to my tumblr, and there were quite a few responses about Rey and food and feels, and I -- I thought I’d grab Rey, metaphorically speaking, and plunk her right down in front of a laden table and basically let her eat everything in sight.
> 
> And then I thought: what’s better than Rey getting to eat new things and having feels about these new things? Rey getting to eat new things *with her new family and her new friends*. And so this huge sprawling multi-course banquet of a big bang story came about. 
> 
> Spot the cameos from Rogue Squadron from the Star Wars Extended Universe, as well as the game Dragon Age: Inquisition!
> 
> The inspiration for the food came from some of my very favorite books. That includes the Gentleman Bastards sequence by Scott Lynch, and Nigella Lawson’s cookbook Feast.
> 
> Actual food items in this fic include the sweet ice that Poe puts together for Rey and Finn, which is based on halo-halo (in the Philippines) and patbingsu (in South Korea). The soup in the final chapter is based on sinigang, a beloved staple of Filipino cuisine, translated into the Galaxy Far Far Away. 
> 
> The rootleaf stew appears in the Original Trilogy -- it was the dish Yoda cooked for Luke on Dagobah -- and you can actually cook it if you’re so inclined, as it was made into an Earth-based dish by none other than the acclaimed American food critic and cook Craig Claiborne.


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